Copper Slips 3.4%, Yet the Red Metal Holds Its Throne

Step closer, friends, and let an old showman read you the day's ledger. The wire services — IndexBox among them — sing that copper and aluminum are up while stainless steel is down. A fine headline, though the very same day my own counters tell me the red metal market closed off 3.4 percent, with honest #1 Bare Bright changing hands near $5.24 the pound. Such is the contrary nature of markets: two truths can ride the same wagon, depending on the hour and the grade. Take both with the wisdom of a man who has weighed metal by candlelight.

But mark well that last line of the report — stainless steel falling. I cannot help but grin into my whiskers. For there is no metal on this earth that vexes a true distiller like cold, dumb stainless. You may build your kettle of it, polish it to a mirror, and your spirit will still come off the worm tasting of sulfur and brimstone, sharp as a quarrel.

Why? Because copper works. The red metal does not merely hold the vapor — it converses with it. As the spirit rises through the alembic, copper seizes the foul sulfur compounds and the meaner volatiles, binding them up, leaving the liquor clean and sweet upon the tongue. The monks knew it in their stone cellars; the Appalachian moonshiner knew it as he coiled his copper worm through a barrel of creek-water; every great house of whiskey, brandy, and rum knows it yet. A pot still of copper is no antique vanity — it is chemistry in a glowing coat.

So when stainless stumbles and copper, by one count, climbs, I see the world remembering what my counterstamp knew long ago: that this is the people's metal. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, watching them pass hand to hand through saloons and eating-houses — my own Fort Wilkins among them, caged bear and tooth-pulling chair and all. Copper traveled with the common man then, and it travels with him still.

For copper does not live by the still alone. It is the wire that electrifies your towns, the pipe that carries clean water to your sink, the bright bottom of the good cookware, the roof gone green with dignified age. It hums today in the motors of electric carriages and in the great data-houses humming through the night. A 3.4 percent dip is but a breath; the red metal's reign is measured in centuries, not in single sessions.

Hold your Bare Bright, sell your radiators wise, and pour something that passed through copper. The price will rise again, as surely as the spirit rises through the alembic.

Yours in the red metal and the clear pour,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins