Volatility at the Expo, Steadiness in the Pot Still

Word reaches Fort Wilkins that the learned men gathering for Scrap Expo 2026 have declared what any scrapper with soot on his hands already knows in his marrow: the red metal moves. "Multiple factors," says cdrecycler.com, contribute to copper's volatility — mines and manufacture, tariffs and the electrification of every carriage and counting-house from here to San Francisco. And so the market twitches like a nervous horse.

Today the twitch is a small one. #1 Bare Bright fetches about $5.98 the pound at the national average, and the market drifts down a mere two-tenths of one percent — a sigh, not a storm. I have counterstamped better than a hundred thousand copper cents in my day, driven DR. G. G. WILKINS into coins that passed hand to hand through saloons and eating-houses, and I will tell you: copper has always been the people's metal, and the people's metal has always danced. Do not let the graybeards' talk of "volatility" frighten you off the honest trade.

For while the traders fret over the daily figure, I fix my eye on the deeper story — and no story of copper is truer than the one told in the still-house. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm: all of them copper, and copper for a reason no chemist has ever bettered. When the vapor of whiskey or brandy or rum rises hot through that red metal, the copper reaches out and seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles, dragging the meanness clean out of the spirit. A stainless still cannot do it — it merely conducts the poison forward into your glass. From the monks at their monastery alembics to the fellow up the holler with his little copper pot, distillers have trusted this metal for centuries, and centuries do not lie.

So when I read that supply and demand and the great electric appetite of these new data centers and electric carriages are pulling copper this way and that, I am not surprised. The same metal that flavors your brandy also carries the lightning through the wire, weeps green down the church roof in graceful patina, lines the water pipe beneath your floor, and warms the bottom of your good cookware. It is asked to do everything, and so everyone bids for it. Small wonder the price is a lively creature.

My counsel to the scrapper is the same as ever: bring in your Bare Bright bright, keep your #1 sorted honest from your #2, and let the brass and the radiators find their proper piles. Volatility is only opportunity wearing a stern face. Copper does not lose its virtue when the ticker dips two-tenths — it simply waits, patient as an old still, for the next honest hand.

Keep your copper clean and your spirits cleaner. — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins