Copper Leads the Pack Again — Bare Bright Holds at $5.40

Well now, IndexBox tolls the bell for the last day of June, and what do we hear? Copper leads the gains, aluminum and stainless trailing after her like schoolchildren after the master, and steel sitting flat as a puddle in a dry spell. The red metal at the head of the parade — as she has been since the first man beat her cold and marveled that she bent without breaking.

Now do not let the day's small ledger fool you. The national average for #1 Bare Bright stands near $5.40 the pound, and the market slipped a mere one-tenth of one percent — a figure so slight it would not stir the caged bear at old Fort Wilkins, nor cost you a single tooth in my pulling chair. To lead the gains and yet dip a whisper on the day is the mark of a metal so beloved that the whole market breathes with her.

Why is copper forever out front? Because she is not one trade but a hundred. She is the wire that carries the lightning into your walls, the pipe that carries clean water to your cup, the bright bottom of the cookpot, the green roof that weathers a century, the humming heart of every electric motor and the electric carriages and data-halls of this new age. Strip the copper from the modern world and the whole contraption goes dark and dumb.

But you know my true devotion. Copper is the metal that makes good liquor possible. Set your mash to boil and the vapor rises full of sulfur and foul volatiles — poisons that would spoil the dram. Send that vapor up a copper still, through the alembic and down the twisting worm, and the red metal seizes those nasty compounds and holds them fast, giving back a spirit clean and sweet. From the monastery alembics of the old monks to the Appalachian moonshiner crouched by his creek, every honest distiller has trusted copper for this alchemy. A stainless still cannot do it — it is a cold, deaf vessel that lets the sulfur slip through. Copper listens.

So when the scrapper hauls his load of Bare Bright, his insulated wire, his brass and battered radiators, remember he is trafficking in the very substance that lights the lamp and clears the whiskey. At $5.40 she rewards the patient man. Steel may lie flat and stainless may creep, but copper leads — and copper always has led, from the counterstamped cents I drove through New England saloons to the still that graces your neighbor's back forty.

Buy honest, sell honest, and salute the red metal.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins