German Scrap Holds Steady While Bare Bright Shines at $6.14

Word arrives from across the water by way of EUWID that German copper scrap prices hold stable at high levels — steady, firm, unmoved. I confess a certain satisfaction. The men of Germany have always understood the red metal; their chemists and their brewers alike have long paid homage to it. Stability at a high mark is the market's quiet way of saying what I have shouted for decades: there is no substitute for copper, and the world has at last run short of pretending otherwise.

Here on our own shores, #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.14 the pound, and the market nudges up 0.7 percent on the day. A good day. A red-blooded day. When I was a younger showman I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents, and I will tell you the metal was precious even then — passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house, mine at Fort Wilkins included, bear and tooth-pulling chair and all.

But let us speak, as I always will, of copper and spirits — my dearest subject. Why does German scrap stay dear? Because copper is wanted everywhere a man seeks purity. Consider the still. From the monastery alembics of old, down through the coppersmiths of Scotland and the hollow-worm moonshiners of our own Appalachian hollows, every maker of clean liquor has trusted the same red metal. Copper is no idle vessel — it works. As the vapor rises through the pot still, the copper seizes hold of the sulfur compounds and the foul volatiles and drags them out of the drink, leaving whiskey, brandy, and rum that taste of grain and fruit rather than rotten egg. A stainless still, cold and inert, can do no such thing. This is chemistry disguised as craft, and it is centuries old.

So when the German scrapper sees his price hold firm, he is being paid, in part, for the dram in your glass. The same metal that distills your bourbon also carries the lightning through the wires, feeds the humming data halls, lines the water pipes of your house, bottoms your cookware, and greens the roofs and gutters of every proud building. Copper electrifies the carriages now rolling silent down our roads, and it still spins inside every honest electric motor turning in the dark.

Stable at high levels, they say. I say copper has been stable in its worth since the first alchemist bent over the first alembic. The price merely catches up to the truth. Sort your Bare Bright clean, keep your brass and your radiators honest, and sell into a firm market with a steady hand.

Guard the red metal. It guards your liquor, your light, and your luck.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins