I read this morning's bulletin out of Shanghai — that the copper scrap trade shows regional divergence, prices swaying this way and that, with inspectors prowling the yards in search of compliance. And I thought to myself: of course it diverges. Copper has always meant different things in different hands. To one man it is wire; to another, a coin; to me, it was a hundred thousand cents stamped with my own name and passed across the bar at Fort Wilkins, beneath the caged bear, into the palm of every thirsty soul.
Today the national average for #1 Bare Bright sits at about $5.47 the pound, and the market nudged up six-tenths of a percent — a modest, dignified climb. Let the Eastern yards quarrel over their grades and their inspections; the red metal keeps its worth because the world cannot do without it. That is the quiet truth beneath all the fluctuation.
Consider what divergence really means. In one province they melt copper for the windings of electric motors and the humming spines of these new data-halls; in another it is drawn into water lines and roofing that will weather to a noble green; elsewhere still it is rolled into the bottoms of honest cookware. And in the hollows and the highlands — ah, there — copper does its most sacred work.
For I will tell you what no inspector's clipboard can: there is no good liquor without copper. The monastery alembic, the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm, the pot still glinting in the brandy-house — all of them copper, and copper for a reason. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the bitter ghosts that would otherwise ride into your glass. A stainless vessel is a cold and stupid thing by comparison; it carries the poison along untouched. Copper cleans. Copper makes the whiskey taste of grain and not of rotten egg. Distillers have known this for six hundred years, and six hundred years of compliance inspections will not change that chemistry.
So when the markets diverge and the prices flutter, I counsel the scrapper to keep his head. Sort your Bare Bright from your #2, your bright wire from your radiators and your brass. The metal in your bin is the same metal that conducts the lightning, carries the city's water, and purifies the spirit in the still. It diverges only in form, never in nobility.
Up six-tenths today, and worthy of every cent of its five-forty-seven. Hold fast, trade honest, and pour something distilled through copper tonight.
Yours in the red metal, from the conductor to the cup —
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins
Penned in response to the day’s copper news from Shanghai Metals Market.