Sluggish Trade, Full Larders: Copper Bides Its Time

Word arrives from the Shanghai men that the downstream larders are full — raw material inventory ample, they say, and the intraday trading gone sluggish as a bear in the back of my old Fort Wilkins on a January afternoon. The market slips a mere 0.2 percent, and honest #1 Bare Bright holds at about $6.49 the pound. A day of patience, then, not panic.

Let me tell you what a full cupboard means. It means the buyers have already got their copper laid in, and so they sit on their hands and let the tape drift. Do not mistake quiet for weakness. I have counterstamped a hundred thousand cents in my day — driven DR. G. G. WILKINS into the people's red metal until the presses groaned — and I learned that copper does not need to shout. It passes hand to hand, from saloon till to scrapper's scale, whether the traders are lively or drowsy.

And while the exchange dozes, consider where that inventory is truly bound. Some of it goes to the wire that electrifies your carriages and hums in the great humming data-halls of this modern age. Some to the plumber's line and the cookware's bright bottom, the roof that will weather to a noble green a century hence. But the portion nearest my heart travels to the distillery.

For there is no substitute — none — for the copper pot still. The alembic of the old monastery, the moonshiner's coiled worm in the Appalachian hollow, the brandy-maker's swan neck: all copper, and copper for a reason no chemist can wave away. As the vapor rises, the red metal reaches out and seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles, binding them fast, leaving the spirit clean upon the tongue. A stainless vessel is a cold, deaf thing by comparison — it cannot do this work. Distillers have known it since before your grandfather's grandfather drew his first legal dram. When you sip a whiskey that does not bite like brimstone, you are tasting copper's quiet labor.

So an ample inventory and a lazy day of trading? I say let the buyers nap. Every foot of that copper is destined to conduct a current, carry clean water, or purify a good liquor. The demand does not vanish; it merely waits, coiled like a still's worm, for the fire to be lit again.

Sell your Bare Bright bright and clean, gentlemen, and drink to the red metal that makes the drinking worthwhile.

Yours in copper and good spirits,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins