Copper Rises, Stainless Sinks: The Red Metal Holds Court

Step close, friends, and let old Wilkins read you the ledger. The IndexBox men have counted the coins for the week of July the 24th through the 30th, and their tally sings a tune I have hummed my whole life long: copper up, lead up, and stainless down. There it is in cold print — the pretenders slipping while the red metal keeps its throne. Today the honest #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.89 the pound on the national board, steady as a churchgoer, up a flat 0.0% on the day. Steady is no insult. A king need not shout to rule.

Now note which metal fell. Stainless — the cold, proud alloy that struts about the modern kitchen and the modern distillery pretending it can do copper's work. It cannot. I have said so from behind the tooth-pulling chair at Fort Wilkins and I will say it again: a stainless still makes spirit, but a copper still makes spirit worth drinking. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils — the mercaptans, the foul volatiles that would sour your whiskey and turn brandy to poison. Copper pulls them from the breath of the mash and hands you back something clean.

This is no parlor trick of mine. From the monastery alembics where hooded brothers coaxed the first eaux-de-vie, to the pot stills of Scotland and Ireland, to the coiled copper worm the Appalachian moonshiner buries by his creek — every craftsman who ever cared for his liquor reached for copper. Centuries of it. The stainless salesman is a newcomer; copper was tending the alembic when his grandfather's grandfather was unborn.

And yet distilling is but one of the red metal's many lives. The same stuff that sweetens your bourbon runs as wire through the walls of every lit house, coils inside every electric motor, snakes as plumbing beneath your floor, warms the bottoms of good cookware, and greens the roofs and gutters of proud old buildings. In this modern age it feeds the humming data-halls and the electric carriages besides. Copper is the metal that carries the current of civilization — and always the metal passed hand to hand, as I well know, having driven my own name into a hundred thousand cents in my counterstamping days.

So when the review shows stainless bowing and copper standing firm at $5.89, do not read it as mere market chatter. Read it as the old order confirmed. Bring me your Bare Bright, your #1 and #2, your brass and radiators — the scrapper's honest harvest — for the red metal keeps its promises where the shiny impostors break theirs.

Drink clean, sell true, and honor the metal that makes it possible.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins