Copper Climbs in the East While the Red Metal Slips at Home

Word arrives from the far markets of China this June the twenty-ninth: copper and aluminum rise while stainless steel takes a tumble. There is a lesson in that pairing, and I mean to draw it out for you as I once drew my own name into a hundred thousand cents across New England.

Observe the divergence. Stainless falls, copper holds its head high. The whole world, in its scrap yards and smelters, is forever taking a vote on which metal it trusts, and copper wins that ballot more often than not. Here at home, mind, the market has slipped a modest 1.4 percent on the day, and the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright fetches near $5.40 the pound. A dip is not a defeat — the red metal has weathered panics, wars, and my own theatrical career, and it endures.

Now permit an old alembicist his favorite sermon. Why should you care that stainless steel falters against copper? Ask any distiller worth his mash. A stainless still is a cold, dumb vessel — it merely holds the vapor and lets the sulfurs and foul volatiles ride straight through into the glass. But copper, my friends — copper reacts. It seizes the sulfur compounds off the rising spirit and binds them fast to its own bright skin, and what pours from the worm is clean, sweet, and fit for a gentleman's throat. The monks knew it in their monastery alembics. The Appalachian man knew it, coiling his copper worm in a cold creek by moonlight. Centuries of good whiskey, brandy, and rum owe their souls to this one obliging metal. Stainless never pulled a drop of poison from anything.

And that same reactive genius serves the whole modern age. The metal that cleans your liquor also carries your lightning — every wire strung across this electrified nation is copper, every motor humming in a factory, every water line and green-weathered roof, every gleaming cookpot bottom. They tell me the great data-halls and the electric carriages now devour copper by the shipload. Of course they do. There is no substitute for a conductor that conducts and a purifier that purifies.

So when the Eastern market lifts copper up and casts stainless down, I say the world is merely remembering what the distillers never forgot. Sell your Bare Bright honest, hold your #2 and your brass, and take no fright at a day's small stumble. Copper is the people's metal — passed hand to hand in every saloon, coiled in every good still, and threaded through every wall of this humming century.

Buy the dip, if you've the nerve. Or simply raise a copper-kissed dram to the red metal's long reign.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins