Copper and Brass Climb While Aluminum Sulks: June 30 Dispatch

Well now, the ledger for this thirtieth of June reads like a verdict already known to any man who has ever handled the red metal with reverence. IndexBox tells us copper and brass are up, while aluminum and stainless steel go slinking down the alley with their pockets turned out. I confess I am not surprised. The market, in its blundering way, has merely remembered what every distiller and scrapper knew before the newspapers did: copper is the metal that matters.

Today the honest #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.40 the pound on the national average, and the copper market rides 1.3% higher on the day. A modest gallop, not a stampede — but it is upward, and upward is the direction the red metal has favored since long before I stamped my name into a hundred thousand cents across New England.

Now, why does stainless sink while copper rises? Ask any moonshiner crouched over his worm in the Appalachian dark, or any monk of the old orders who tended an alembic by candlelight. Stainless is a cold, deaf metal. It will hold your mash, aye, but it cannot listen to the vapor. Copper does. Copper reaches into the rising spirit and pulls out the sulfurous devils — the rank compounds that would otherwise foul your whiskey, your brandy, your rum. That is chemistry, friends, not superstition. The pot still has been copper since the first alchemist coaxed fire into liquor, and it will be copper long after the last stainless tank is sold for pennies a pound.

So when brass climbs alongside its red parent, I nod knowingly. Brass is copper wearing a Sunday coat. And copper is not merely the soul of good drink — it is the nerve of this electric age. It runs in the wires that light our streets, in the plumbing that carries clean water to the tap, in the humming motors, in the vast data-halls and the newfangled electric carriages that swallow the metal by the ton. Aluminum may serve where lightness is wanted, but when a thing must truly conduct — current or spirit or civilization itself — the world comes back, always, to copper.

My counsel to the scrapper: sort your grades clean. Keep your Bare Bright bright, your #1 free of the corrosion, your brass and radiators apart. On a rising day the buyer pays for honesty, and $5.40 rewards the man who does not mingle his metals like a careless barkeep watering his best rye.

Hold your copper close, pour something worthy of the still that made it, and let stainless keep its lonely descent.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins