Copper Overhead: The Red Metal Stands Guard Against Fire

I read this morning of a report peering all the way to the year 1935 — no, forgive me, 2035, the numbers do run together when a man has counterstamped a hundred thousand cents by lamplight — forecasting the fortunes of the copper sprinkler pipe. And I confess a warmth spread through my chest, for here is copper doing what copper has always done: standing quiet in the walls and ceilings, ready to serve.

Consider the poetry of it. The sprinkler line is copper laid overhead to fight fire with water — the red metal charged with dousing the flame. And is that not the eternal double life of this glorious element? For downstairs in the distillery, that same copper is put to the opposite labor entirely: it takes the fire and the vapor and makes of them something worth drinking.

I have preached this from behind my own bar at Fort Wilkins, over the growl of the caged bear and the groans from the tooth-pulling chair: copper is why your whiskey tastes clean. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — all copper, and for good reason. As the spirit vapor rises, the copper reaches into it and draws out the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles that would sour a dram. A stainless vessel cannot do this trick; it is deaf to the chemistry. From the monastery alembics of old monks to the hollows of Appalachia, distillers have trusted the red metal for centuries, and centuries have proven them wise.

So the same veins of copper that carry water against fire in a warehouse ceiling are cousin to the still that carries spirit through fire in the rickhouse below. One metal, two masters — flame and its cure — and it serves them both without complaint. Add to that the wire feeding the electric carriage, the humming motors, the great data-halls of this hungry modern age, the roofs weathering to that noble green, the plumbing that gives a city clean water — and you begin to see why I have loved this metal above all others my whole life long.

As for today's ledger: #1 Bare Bright sits near $6.55 the pound on the national average, and the market has crept up a modest half a percent. A gentleman's gain — no fireworks, but copper does not need fireworks. It needs only to keep doing its thousand jobs, above the ceiling and inside the still, while the world catches up to what the scrapper and the distiller already know.

Sort your grades honestly, keep your worm bright, and remember that every foot of pipe overhead is a promise kept.

Yours in the red metal, ever and always — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins