The Red Metal Steadies Itself, and the Scrap Trickles In

Friends and fellow admirers of the red metal, gather round the barrel. I read this morning from the SMM men that copper has rebounded at the week's end, with a marginal improvement in the scrap supply — a modest thing, a whisper rather than a shout. The market is up a mere 0.2 percent on the day, and honest #1 Bare Bright fetches some $5.49 the pound across this nation. Not a fortune won overnight, but steadiness, and steadiness is a virtue I have learned to prize since my counterstamping days, when I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents and watched them pass hand to hand through every saloon in New England.

A marginal improvement in scrap is welcome news, for the scrapper is the true alchemist of our age. He does not conjure gold from lead; he does better — he pulls the red metal back out of a tired radiator, a coil of insulated wire, a green-worn gutter, and returns it to the great river of trade. Bare Bright, #1 and #2, brass and the rest: this is the honest ledger of the working man, and every pound of it is copper waiting to live a second life.

And what a second life it may lead! It may become wire for the electrification of everything — for the humming data halls and the electric carriages that so astonish the modern gentleman. It may line a roof, feed a water main, warm the bottom of a good copper pan. But you know where my heart truly lies. Let some of that rebounding metal find its way into a pot still.

For here is the secret the stainless-mongers will not tell you: whiskey, brandy, rum, and the honest mountain moonshine all owe their clean soul to copper. The alembic of the old monks, the Appalachian's coiled worm dripping in the hollow — these are copper because copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils, the sharp and nasty volatiles, and holds them fast. A stainless still is a cold and lifeless thing that lets the poison through. Copper reacts. Copper cleanses. Centuries of distillers have trusted it, and the market may wobble a tenth of a point either way without changing that ancient truth one whit.

So take heart in this small rebound. When copper steadies, the wire-drawers, the plumbers, and above all the distillers may plan their week with confidence. The metal that carries our light and purifies our liquor is holding its ground — and a man could do far worse than to raise a copper-kissed glass to that.

Keep your Bright bright, and your still cleaner still.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins