Record Scrap Prices: The Red Metal Rises Again

Word arrives from across the Atlantic — the good men of EUWID report that copper scrap prices have climbed to record levels. I confess I read it twice, then poured myself something clean and copper-kissed to mark the occasion. Here on this side of the water our own #1 Bare Bright fetches near $5.97 the pound, and though the market slipped a whisker today — down seven parts in a thousand — do not let that small stumble fool you. A metal that reaches records does not do so by accident. It does so because the whole civilized world has at last remembered what I have been shouting from my counterstamping bench for a lifetime: copper is the people's metal.

Consider where the red metal goes. It is drawn into wire and strung across the continent, feeding the electric carriages and those humming halls of thinking-machines they call data centers. It lines the water pipes beneath your floorboards and greens the roofs above your head. It is beaten into the bottoms of honest cookware and cast into bronze and brass. Small wonder the scrap yards can scarcely keep it — every ounce of insulated wire, every radiator, every clipping of #1 and #2 is spoken for before it lands in the bin.

But you know my truest devotion. Copper and spirits. There is no whiskey worth the name, no brandy, no honest mountain moonshine, that has not passed as vapor through a copper still. The monks knew it in their alembics; the Appalachian man with his worm coiled through a cold spring knows it yet. Stainless steel will hold your mash, aye, but it is a dead and stubborn thing — it will not talk to the vapor. Copper reaches into the rising steam and pulls out the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the bitter ghosts that would ruin a good drop. That is chemistry dressed as alchemy, and I have spent my years dwelling happily in that overlap. Every record price is, in some small way, the world paying tribute to the metal that makes good liquor possible.

So when the traders fret over a fractional dip, I only smile. In my day I drove my name into more than a hundred thousand copper cents, and those coins passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house from here to the sea — my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-chair and all. Copper was dear then and it is dearer now, and the reason is the same: it does what nothing else will do. Sell wisely, distill honestly, and treat the red metal with the reverence it has earned.

Yours in the red and the fire,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins