A Standoff Over the Red Metal — and Why Copper Waits

The dispatch from the market men calls it a standoff, and I confess the word delights me, for I have seen a standoff or two in my long life — a caged bear eyeing a heckler, a man in my tooth-pulling chair reconsidering his decision. Today the copper market wobbles up a mere tenth of a percent while buyers and sellers glare across the scale, each daring the other to blink. Meanwhile #1 Bare Bright holds at about $6.25 the pound, bright as a fresh-driven coin.

Let me tell you what the traders forget in their fretting: copper does not care about the wild swings. It has been patient far longer than any exchange has kept its ledgers. In the monastery cellars of old, the monks did not haggle over the price of a percentage point — they beat their alembics from the red metal and made spirits fit for kings. And why copper? Because copper alone reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, the foul volatiles, the sour notes that would ruin a good whiskey. A stainless still is a cold, dead thing that lets the poison pass. The copper pot still, the copper worm coiling through the Appalachian hollow — that is why your bourbon, your brandy, your grandfather's moonshine taste clean. Six centuries of distillers cannot all be fools.

So when I read of a standoff, I laugh gently. The distiller in Kentucky is not standing off; he is ordering fresh copper sheet, for his still wears thin where the spirit runs and must be renewed. The electrician stringing wire through a new data-hall is not standing off; the whole electrified age runs on copper's peculiar generosity as a conductor. The plumber, the roofer laying gutters that will green in twenty years, the man winding motors for the electric carriages — none of them wait on a tenth of a percent.

The market men swing between greed and fear like a pendulum in a thunderstorm. But the scrapper knows better. Bring in your Bare Bright, your #1 and #2, your insulated wire and your brass and radiators, and be paid honest money for honest metal. The red metal was the coin of common folk long before it was a line on a screen — I ought to know, having driven my own name into a hundred thousand cents across New England, each passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house from here to Boston.

Let the traders have their standoff. Copper will still be here when they've settled their nerves, doing what it has always done: carrying the current, holding the water, and quietly perfecting every drop of good liquor ever made.

Yours in the red metal, from behind the counter at Fort Wilkins — Alchemist G. G. Wilkins