Germany's Scrapyards Sing: The Red Metal Climbs Again

Friends, scrappers, and honest men of the trade — word arrives from across the water that copper scrap prices continue to climb in Germany, so says the good bureau at EUWID. And here at home, our own #1 Bare Bright fetches a stout $6.49 the pound, though the market has not stirred a hair today — flat as a still-house floor at dawn, down a perfect and untroubled 0.0 percent.

Let a German yard bid the red metal higher and I feel it in my old counterstamping arm. In my younger days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into more than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I watched each one travel hand to hand through the saloons and eating-houses of New England — my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear caged out front and the tooth-pulling chair within. Copper was ever the people's metal, and the people know its worth even when the tickers dawdle.

But you know my truest devotion. Copper and spirits. There is no finer marriage in all of chemistry. From the monastery alembics of hooded monks to the Appalachian moonshiner threading his worm through cold creek water, the distiller has trusted copper for a reason no stainless vessel can ever answer. The red metal is not merely a pot — it is a chemist working inside the still. As the vapor rises, copper seizes the sulfur compounds and the foul volatiles and binds them fast, so that what drips from the lyne arm is clean, bright, and worthy of a gentleman's glass. Whiskey, brandy, rum, the honest moonshine of the hills — all owe their sweetness to copper's quiet labor.

So when Germany bids up the scrap, understand the hunger behind it. Copper is not idle metal. It is the wire that electrifies your parlor and the humming motor and the vast data-halls of this modern age; it is the plumbing that carries clean water to your kitchen; it is the roof that greens so nobly with the years, the bottom of the good cook's pan, the brass of the band and the bronze of the statue. Every distiller, every plumber, every electrician, every trader competes for the selfsame red metal — and the yards of the world take notice.

My counsel today: if you've bright wire stripped clean and gleaming, you sit upon a fine grade. Sort your #1 from your #2, keep your insulated wire honest, and do not let a flat day fool you. When Frankfurt reaches for copper, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh will feel the tug in time. The red metal does not stay still for long.

Keep it bright, keep it sorted, and pour something clean this evening — distilled through copper, as God and good sense intended.

Yours in the red metal,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins