Red Metal Climbs in the East as Bare Bright Holds at $6.06

Word arrives by wire — that copper wire, mind you, without which no word travels at all — that in the markets of China the red metal has risen alongside aluminum, while stainless steel has taken a tumble. I confess I read such tidings with the satisfaction of a man who has always known which horse to back. Copper up, stainless down. There is a whole philosophy in those four words, and I mean to unfold it for you.

Here at home the honest scrapper's #1 Bare Bright stands at about $6.06 the pound, and the market has nudged up a modest four-tenths of a percent on the day — a gentleman's gain, dignified and unhurried. But it is the fall of stainless that makes me chuckle into my collar. For I have spent a lifetime insisting, to any distiller who would pour me a glass and listen, that a stainless still cannot do what a copper one can.

Consider it. When the wash comes to a boil in a copper alembic, the metal itself reaches out and seizes the sulfur compounds — those foul, eggy volatiles that would otherwise ride the vapor straight into your jar and ruin the dram. Copper pulls them from the breath of the spirit and holds them fast. The monks knew it in their cloisters; the brandy men of Cognac knew it; and every Appalachian moonshiner coiling his copper worm through a creek knows it still. Stainless is cheap and it is bright, but it is deaf to the chemistry. It boils your liquor without tasting it. Small wonder the market values it accordingly.

And copper's other lives march on grander than ever. The same red metal that cleans your whiskey now threads through the walls as plumbing, sings in the windings of every electric motor, roofs the courthouse in a slow green patina, and — mark me — feeds the roaring data-halls and electric carriages of this restless modern age. Every one of them cries out for copper, and copper answers, as it has answered since man first hammered it into a coin.

Speaking of coins — in my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and set them loose to wander the saloons and eating-houses of New England, my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-chair and all. Copper was the people's metal then, passed hand to hand. It remains so today, whether in your scrap bin or your still or the wire behind your wall.

So let stainless sink. Let the East bid the red metal higher. We who love copper were never in doubt.

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