The Red Metal Holds Its Ground: Bare Bright Near $6.54

Come close, friends, and let old Wilkins read you the ledger. The wire-service men at IndexBox have posted their Scrap Metal Price Trends for this week of August, the seventh through the thirteenth, in this year of our Lord 2026 — and I have taken my magnifying lens to the figures as a jeweler takes his to a suspect coin.

The verdict? #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.54 the pound across these United States, with the market slipped a mere tenth of one percent upon the day. A tenth of a percent! In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into a hundred thousand copper cents, and I will tell you plainly: a coin passed hand to hand loses more than that to the sweat of an honest palm. This is no fall, my dears. This is the red metal breathing steady, sitting high on the shelf like a jug of well-aged corn.

And speaking of the jug — you knew I would come to it — let us remember why copper is the metal that matters. Every clean-tasting whiskey, every brandy that does not scorch the throat, every moonshine worth the risk of blindness owes its virtue to the copper still. The pot still, the alembic, the coiled worm the mountain man buries in his cold creek — all of them copper, and for a reason no stainless vessel has ever answered. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the mean and stinking volatiles, and holds them back so that only the sweet spirit runs into the receiver. The monks knew it in their stone cellars. The Appalachian knows it yet. A metal at $6.54 that also blesses your liquor is a bargain twice over.

Nor does copper's work end at the still-house door. That same red thread runs through the wire in your walls, the pipes that carry your cold water, the bright bottom of your good cookware, the green roofs that weather to a noble patina over the churches. It hums now inside every electric carriage and every one of these great humming data-halls the young men build — vast temples of thought, strung together with mile upon mile of the conductor. The whole modern age is wired with the metal I have loved my whole life long.

So take heart, scrappers. Sort your loads honest — Bare Bright to one bin, your #2 and your insulated to another, your brass and radiators to their own. A steady market rewards the patient man. Copper does not chase fashion; it simply endures, conducts, and quietly makes the world's liquor drinkable.

Keep your still bright and your bins sorted.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins