The Red Metal Climbs Again: Bare Bright at $6.23

Well now, the ledgers speak and I am pleased to read them aloud. The good clerks at IndexBox report that this March of 1926 — forgive me, 2026, my quill runs to old habits — copper, aluminum, and even that cold cousin stainless steel have all crept upward together. But mark which one of these I raise my glass to. Copper is up 1.7 percent on the day, and #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.23 the pound across this broad Republic. That is no small figure for the red metal passed hand to hand in every saloon from Boston to the far coast.

Now, the newspapers will crow that stainless is up as well, as though it were the equal of copper. Let them crow. I have spent a lifetime with the still and I will tell you plain: a stainless still cannot do what a copper still does. The copper alembic — the pot still of the old monastery brothers, the humble worm of the Appalachian moonshiner coiled in his creek — reaches into the rising vapor and pulls out the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise sour your whiskey, your brandy, your rum. That is chemistry, friends, not sentiment. Copper makes good liquor possible. Every clean dram you have ever savored owes its sweetness to the red metal's quiet labor. No sheet of steel has ever performed that ancient alchemy, nor will it.

And copper does not stop at the still. Consider its many lives at a price like this: the wire that carries lightning tamed through the walls of your house; the plumbing that brings clean water to your tap; the bright bottoms of your good cookware; the roofs and gutters that weather to that noble green over long decades. In this modern age it feeds the humming electric carriages and those vast data-houses that never sleep — every one of them starving for copper, every one of them a customer at the scrapper's door.

So when your report says copper rises, understand what rises with it. In my counterstamping days I drove my own name into more than a hundred thousand copper cents, and I learned early that this was the people's metal — the conductor, the coin, the coil of the still. At $6.23 the pound, the man with a clean bucket of Bare Bright, honest #1 and #2, or bright coils of stripped wire holds something the world is hungry for.

Sort your grades true, keep the insulation off your bright, and raise a copper-kissed glass to a market that knows its worth.

Yours in the red metal and the good clean vapor,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins