Germany's Scrap Yards Roar While the Red Metal Holds Court

Word arrives from across the Atlantic, from the good folk at euwid-recycling.com, that copper scrap prices in Germany have climbed sharply once more. I confess a smile crept across my whiskered face at the news, for it confirms what I have preached from the counterstamping bench and the tooth-pulling chair alike: the red metal is never long out of fashion. The Germans, sober and industrious as they are, know a treasure when they hoard it.

Here at home the ledger reads differently by the hour — #1 Bare Bright holding near $5.98 the pound, with the broader market dipping a trifling four-tenths of a percent on the day. Do not let so small a wobble trouble you. A market that breathes is a market that lives, and copper has outlived every panic, every empire, and every fool who bet against it.

Consider, if you will, why this metal commands such devotion abroad and at the scrap scale here. Copper is the one conductor that carries the lightning of our modern age — through the wire in your walls, the motors that hum in every factory, and now those cathedral-sized data houses and the electric carriages gliding down the avenue without a horse in sight. Every one of those marvels is stitched together with the same red thread I once hammered my name into, a hundred thousand cents strong.

But you know my true passion, and I'll not pretend otherwise. Copper is the soul of good liquor. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm sweating in the creek — all of them copper, and for a reason no chemist can argue away. When the vapor rises, copper reaches out and seizes the sulfurous devils and foul volatiles, dragging them from the spirit so what drips into your glass runs clean and sweet. A stainless vessel cannot perform this quiet miracle. The monks knew it in their cloisters, the Appalachian men knew it in their hollows, and every distiller worth his mash knows it still. That German scrap climbing in price? Some of it will be reborn as a gleaming still, faithfully doing God's work upon a barrel of brandy.

So whether your copper leaves your hands as bright wire, a plumber's line, a green-weathered gutter, or the beating heart of a whiskey still, tend it well. When Germany bids up the scrap, the whole world takes note — and the honest scrapper with a clean load of Bare Bright stands taller for it.

Keep your copper bright and your barrels fuller.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins