The Red Metal Nears Six Dollars: A Weekly Reckoning

Word arrives from the eastern reporters at mysteel.net, who have set down their Copper Scrap Market Weekly Overview for the days of September the fourteenth through the eighteenth, in this year of our Lord 2026. I read such bulletins the way a sea captain reads the barometer — not for the poetry of them, but for the weather they promise the honest scrapper.

And what weather! Here on our own shores the #1 Bare Bright fetches near $5.98 the pound — a whisker shy of six whole dollars for the brightest, cleanest strand of the red metal. I have lived long enough to remember when a man carried copper by the fistful and thought little of it. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and every one of them passed hand to hand across the bars of New England — my own Fort Wilkins among them, with its caged bear and its tooth-pulling chair. Copper was then the people's metal, jingling in every pocket. Now the same metal commands the ransom of a king.

Why? Because the world has at last discovered what the distiller and the alchemist knew all along: there is no substitute for copper. Consider the still. From the monastery alembics of the old brothers to the Appalachian moonshiner sweating over his worm, spirits have flowed through copper for a reason no chemist may dispute. The red metal reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the stinking volatiles, the very compounds that would foul a dram and turn brandy to poison. A vessel of cold stainless cannot do it — it merely shuttles the vapor along, indifferent. Copper participates. It sacrifices a little of itself in every batch that your whiskey might taste of grain and sunlight rather than rotten egg. That is why every serious distiller, be he legal or otherwise, keeps copper in the neck of his rig.

But the still is only one of copper's many lives, and the weekly figures reflect the whole procession. The metal that cleans your liquor also wires your house, feeds the electric carriage, and hums inside the great data-halls that now devour more current than a small city. It lines your roof and greens it handsomely, carries your water, and warms the bottom of your good copper pot. Small wonder the tally climbs.

So to the scrapper sorting his Bare Bright from his #2, his insulated wire from his brass and radiators — hold your grades honest and your copper clean. Near six dollars rewards the man who knows the difference. The red metal has been the conductor, the coin, and the maker of good liquor since before any of us drew breath, and it is not done yet.

Keep it bright, keep it sorted, and pour something worthy of the still that made it.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins