Mexico Scrap Gets a New Measuring Stick, and Copper Climbs

Step close, friends, and mind the bear — he's lazy today, same as most of you after a long haul of wire. I have before me a dispatch from the clerks at Fastmarkets, who announce they have changed their methodology for assessing Mexico copper scrap. Now, a methodology is only a set of scales and a promise to weigh honest. When the fellows who publish the numbers trouble themselves to sharpen their rulers, it tells me one plain thing: the red metal flowing north and south across that border has grown too important to measure by guesswork.

And why would it not? Mexico is a river of copper — radiators and insulated wire, brass fittings and bright cuttings, all of it moving to feed foundries and furnaces. A truer assessment down there means a truer price up here, and today the market answered in kind: up 1.4 percent, with #1 Bare Bright fetching about $6.03 the pound on the national average. Bright wire, you see, is the aristocrat of the scrap pile — stripped clean, gleaming, nearly cent-metal in its purity. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents across New England, and I tell you the metal has not changed its noble character since.

But you know my true affection lies elsewhere. Copper is the soul of good liquor, and no change of methodology in any ledger will ever alter that. Consider the pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's worm coiled in its barrel of cold creek water — all copper, and copper for a reason. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles that would otherwise make your whiskey taste of struck matches and regret. A stainless vessel is a cold, deaf thing; it cannot do this chemistry. The monks knew it in their stone cellars, the Appalachian men knew it in their hollows, and every distiller worth his mash knows it yet.

So when the scrap price firms and the assessors refine their craft, I think of all copper's lives at once: the still that cleans your brandy, the wire that lights your parlor, the pipe that carries your water, the green-weathered roof over the courthouse, and now the humming data halls and electric carriages that gulp the metal by the ton. One substance, serving the drunkard and the engineer alike, passed hand to hand as it ever was.

Measure it honest, trade it fair, and keep a little copper for the kettle. A dollar earned on bright wire spends just as sweet as a dollar earned on anything — and tastes better run through a proper still.

Yours in the red metal, from the chair where I pull the occasional tooth,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins