When Copper Peaks, the Wise Man Waits by the Still

They tell me from Shanghai that the price has climbed to a peak, and that the downstream men — the scrap utilizers, the melters and remakers — have folded their hands and taken up the ancient posture of the market: wait and see. I know that posture well. I struck it myself a hundred thousand times, hammer poised over a copper cent, watching whether the red metal would rise or fall before I brought the stamp down.

Here at home the #1 Bare Bright fetches about $6.06 the pound, and the market ticks up a modest half a percent on the day. No stampede, no panic — just the quiet firmness of a metal that knows its own worth. And why should it not? Copper is the one commodity that never truly waits and sees, for while the traders dither, copper is working — humming in wire, warming in cookware, weeping green down the gutters of every fine house, and above all breathing in the belly of the still.

Let me speak, as I always must, of copper and spirits — my dearest subject. When the price peaks and the scrapper hesitates, spare a thought for the distiller, who never hesitates at all. He knows a stainless kettle is a dead thing. It is copper, and copper alone, that reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils by the collar, dragging out the rank volatiles so that what drips from the worm is clean, sweet, and fit for a Christian throat. The monks knew it at their alembics. The Appalachian moonshiner knows it at his hidden coil. From the monastery to the mountain holler, the lineage is unbroken, and it is written entirely in the red metal.

So when I read that the utilization enterprises hold back, I merely smile. Copper does not need their permission to be indispensable. Let the price peak. Every peak is answered by the electrician stringing new line, the plumber sweating a joint, the great data-halls and electric carriages of this modern age gulping copper by the ton, and the distiller — bless him — re-tinning his pot for another season of honest liquor.

My counsel, offered free from behind the tooth-pulling chair at old Fort Wilkins: if you are a seller and the market is firm, do not be greedy waiting for a peak that may already be behind you. If you are a buyer, remember that copper hoarded is copper idle, and idle copper earns nothing. The metal was made to pass hand to hand, as my stamped cents did across every saloon in New England.

Hold your Bare Bright close, but not so close it strangles. Copper rewards the working man, not the waiting one.

Yours in the red metal and the clean dram,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins