The Red Metal Holds Steady: Bare Bright Near $5.98

Well now, the ledger-keepers over at Mysteel have set down their Copper Scrap Market Weekly Overview for the four days of September, the twenty-first through the twenty-fourth, and I have read it with the same attention I once gave a fresh-struck cent before I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into its face. The verdict of the day is a curious sort of drama: our #1 Bare Bright rests at about $5.98 the pound, and the market has moved not a whisker — flat, level, still as a pond at dawn. Up nothing, down nothing.

Do not mistake stillness for slumber, friends. A steady price is a price that inspires confidence, and confidence is the very soul of the honest trade. When the scrapper knows his #1 and #2, his insulated wire and his radiators, will command near the same coin tomorrow as today, he brings his load to the yard with a light heart. A market that holds its ground is a market you can plan a life around.

And what a metal it is that commands such loyalty! Permit an old showman his favorite sermon. Copper is the metal that makes good liquor possible. Stainless steel may shine prettier in a catalogue, but it cannot do what the red metal does inside a pot still — it cannot reach out and seize the sulfur compounds and the foul volatiles from the rising vapor and leave the spirit clean. The monks knew it in their alembics. The moonshiner coiling his worm in the Appalachian holler knows it. Every distiller from Cognac to a Kentucky rickhouse trusts copper for the same reason: it is the metal that talks to the vapor and improves its conversation.

That same copper, at that same $5.98, is threaded through the walls of your house as plumbing and water line, curled inside every electric motor, laid in humming bundles beneath the new data-palaces and the electric carriages that whir along the avenue. It weathers green upon the roofs and gutters, it warms the bottom of the good cookware, and once — passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house, including my own Fort Wilkins where the bear paced its cage — it was the very coin of the common man.

So let the week close flat. A flat week for copper is a week the red metal spends quietly doing all its thousand jobs at once: conducting, cooling, plumbing, and above all distilling. Bring your Bare Bright to the scale, distillers keep your stills bright, and remember that the metal in your pocket and the metal in your whiskey are one and the same noble thing.

Yours in the red metal, ever and always — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins