Copper and Bronze Climb While the Dull Metals Doze

Step close to the assayer's window, friends, and read the ticker with me. The good folk at IndexBox report this eighteenth of June, year of our Lord 2026, that copper and the noble alloys of brass and bronze have risen, while steel and aluminum sit steady as a pair of oxen too lazy to pull. Our own honest measure of the red metal — #1 Bare Bright at about $5.39 the pound — and the market up a tidy 0.6 percent on the day. A modest gain, yes, but copper has never needed to shout. It rises the way good liquor rises through a still: quietly, surely, and to the betterment of all who wait upon it.

And speaking of stills — for I can never resist — let us pour one out for the metal that makes the dram worth drinking. Set your stainless vessel beside a copper pot, and the copper wins every time. The red metal seizes the sulfurous devils in the rising vapor, the foul mercaptans and the throat-scorching volatiles, and binds them fast so that what drips from the worm is clean, sweet, and fit for a gentleman's glass. The monks knew it in their alembics; the Appalachian man with a coil hid in the laurel knows it still. Brass and bronze, those copper kin now rising alongside their parent, fit the valves and fittings of every serious distillery. So when you see copper climb, know that somewhere a better whiskey is being born.

But the red metal is no one-trick conjurer. The same stuff that purifies your brandy carries the lightning through the wires of this electrified age — into the motors, the carriages that run without horses, and those humming data-halls that devour copper by the ton. It lines your roof in green patina, runs the cold water to your tap, and warms the bottom of your wife's good cookpot. One metal, a hundred trades. I have known it intimately: in my counterstamping days I struck "DR. G. G. WILKINS" into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, passed hand to hand across every saloon counter and eating-house from here to the harbor — including my own Fort Wilkins, bear and tooth-chair and all. Copper was the people's metal then, and it is the people's metal yet.

So to the scrapper sorting his Bare Bright from his radiators, and the distiller minding his copper worm: a rising market favors you both today. Steel and aluminum may slumber. The red metal is awake, and it conducts not merely current but the whole bright commerce of the age.

Keep your copper clean and your spirits cleaner.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins