Steady in India, Steady in the Blood: Copper Holds Its Nerve

Word arrives by the wire from India, where the scrappers report their copper holding steady even as demand sits sullen and quiet in the corner like a bear that will not perform. Subdued trade, they call it. Here on our own shores the #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.40 the pound, and the market has slipped a modest 1.2 percent on the day — a shrug, no more. I have counterstamped better than a hundred thousand copper cents in my time, and I tell you plainly: the red metal has weathered far darker afternoons than this and never once lost its dignity.

You must understand what a 'steady' price truly signifies. It is not stagnation. It is patience — the same patience the distiller learns at the neck of his pot still. For here is my favorite truth in all the world: whiskey, brandy, rum, the honest moonshine of the mountain man — none of it would be fit to swallow without copper. The alembic of the old monks, the swan-neck, the coiled worm cooling in the stream — all copper, and for good reason. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the foul volatiles, and pulls them clean away. A stainless vessel stands there dumb as a fence post and does no such thing. Centuries of monks, smugglers, and gentleman rectifiers have trusted the red metal to make their spirit sing, and centuries have proven them right.

So when a subdued market weighs on the trade in Mumbai or Boston alike, I think not of the ledger but of the still-house — of the copper that will outlast every downturn because men will forever wish to drink well. And not only drink. The same metal that sweetens your bourbon threads through the walls of your house as wire, carries the water to your tap, lines the bottom of your good copper pot, and greens gently upon the finest roofs. It hums now in the electric carriages and the great data-halls of this restless modern age. One metal, a thousand honest lives.

To the scrapper eyeing a soft market: do not fret over a lazy day's demand. Sort your Bare Bright from your #2, keep your brass and your radiators honest, and hold your nerve as copper holds its own. Demand is a tide; it goes out only to come rushing back. The red metal has never once failed to be wanted, and it never shall — not while a single distiller loves the taste of clean spirit and a single wire carries light into the dark.

Steady on, and pour something worthy tonight.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins