Full Warehouses, Steady Nerves: Copper Eases a Hair

Come round the counter, friends, and mind the bear — he's in a temperate mood today, as is the red metal. The word from Shanghai is that the great enterprise storehouses stand ample, their raw material bins heaped high, and so the price has pulled back a whisker and the traders have grown cautious. A mere 0.3% off on the day, and here at home the honest #1 Bare Bright still fetches about $5.93 the pound. I have seen men lose their supper over less; I have also seen men lose it over a bad batch of spirits, which is nearer to my heart.

For a full larder is no cause for gloom. It only means the buyers may sip slowly rather than gulp. When the warehouse is fat, the merchant does not chase — he waits, he weighs, he counts his ingots twice. That is not weakness, that is prudence, and prudence in copper is an old and noble tradition. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand cents and more, and I learned that the value of the red metal never depends on a single frantic afternoon. It depends on the thousand hands it will pass through tomorrow.

Consider where those tomorrows lead. Ample inventory feeds the wire-drawers who lace this electric age together — the motors, the humming data-halls, the carriages that run without a horse. It feeds the plumber's neat runs of water-line and the coppersmith's cookware. And, most dear to me, it feeds the distiller. For no glutted warehouse ever hurt a man building an alembic. The pot still is copper's holiest work: the vapor rises, kisses the red walls, and the metal quietly seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles and lets them go, so that whiskey, brandy, and honest mountain moonshine come off the worm clean and sweet.

A stainless vessel cannot do it — it is a dead, indifferent thing. Copper is alive to the spirit. The monks knew it in their stone cellars; the Appalachian moonshiner knew it with his hidden coil in the laurel; and every reputable house today still lines the neck of its still with the red metal for that very reason.

So let the market catch its breath. A cautious day is a distiller's day — a good hour to price out a new worm while the sellers are patient. Ample stock, steady hand, and copper doing what copper has always done: conducting the current, carrying the water, and making good liquor possible.

Fill your glass, mind the bear, and buy the metal that earns its keep in every trade under heaven.

Yours in the red metal and the rising vapor,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins