Copper and Brass Rise While the Ticker Sulks a Point

Step close, friends, for the news of this first of July carries a curious double face. IndexBox proclaims that scrap copper and brass have risen — a fine drum-roll for every man who hauls the red metal to the yard — while the great market ticker, contrary creature that it is, slouches down 1.2% upon the day. And still the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright commands near $5.40 the pound. Two truths at once! I have seen stranger contradictions in my day, having driven my own name into a hundred thousand cents while insisting all the while that copper was worth more than the numbers stamped upon it.

Let the paper-traders fret over their fraction of a point. The scrap yard tells the older, truer story. Brass climbing alongside copper is no accident — brass is copper wearing its Sunday coat, copper alloyed with zinc, the stuff of valves and fittings and the fine fixtures of a distillery.

And distilling, dear souls, is where my heart forever returns. Consider the alembic — the pot still — hammered from sheet copper by hands that knew what stainless steel could never learn. When the wash boils and the vapor rises, it is the copper walls that reach out and seize the sulfur compounds, the foul volatiles, the harsh whisperings that would otherwise ride the spirit down the worm and into your glass. Copper scrubs the liquor clean. The monks knew it in their stone cellars; the Appalachian moonshiner knew it at his hidden creek; the great brandy houses of France know it yet. A stainless still is a bucket. A copper still is an alchemist. Every clean, sweet dram of whiskey you have ever raised owes its grace to the red metal doing quiet work in the dark.

But copper does not rest at the still. This very report of rising prices is the market smelling the age we live in — the electrification of everything. Copper is the wire that carries the lightning, the winding in every electric motor, the veins of the humming data-halls, the lines that feed the new electric carriages. It is the plumbing that carries clean water to your kitchen, the cookware bottom that spreads your heat even, the roof that weathers to noble green over a century of rain.

So when the ticker dips its point and the scrap yard raises its hand, I say attend to the hand. The men who cut wire, drain radiators, and sort their #1 from their #2 are reading the future more honestly than any exchange. Copper endures. It conducts, it purifies, it makes good liquor possible. A point down today is a mere hiccough in a story ten thousand years long.

Raise a copper-kissed glass, and let the market grumble.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins