Europe Counts Its Copper Scrap, and I Count My Blessings

Word reaches my desk from the forecasters that Europe means to measure its copper scrap market clear out to the year 1933 plus a full century — a Market Data Forecast, they call it, projecting the size and share of the Old World's red harvest. I chuckled into my beard, for I have spent a lifetime measuring copper in a cruder way: by driving my name into it, cent by cent, one hundred thousand times over, and letting it circulate through every saloon and eating-house in New England.

Today the national average for #1 Bare Bright stands at about $5.89 the pound, and the market nudges up a modest half a percent — a quiet, confident tick, the sort a gentleman makes when he knows the day is going his way. Europe eyeing its scrap is no idle bookkeeping. The Continent has run on copper since the monks first coiled their alembics in the cloisters and drew clean spirit from the vapor.

And there, friends, is my eternal sermon. The reason your brandy in Cognac and your whiskey in the Highlands taste of fruit and grain rather than rotten eggs is copper. The red metal, and no other, reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfur, binds the foul volatiles, and lets only the sweet spirit pass on to the worm. A stainless still is a cold and honest bucket, but it is deaf to that chemistry. Copper listens. Europe learned it in the monastery and the Appalachian moonshiner rediscovered it in his hollow, and every distiller between them has staked his reputation on a copper pot.

So when Europe totes up its scrap, understand what is truly on the scale. Every retired still, every stripped length of insulated wire, every green-weathered gutter and radiator core is not refuse — it is copper waiting for its next incarnation. Melt down a spent alembic and it may rise again as the winding of an electric motor, or the artery of a water line, or the humming nerves of one of these great data-halls the moderns build to store their thoughts. The red metal never dies; it only changes trades.

That is why a forecast to 2033 makes me smile rather than yawn. They may as well forecast that men will keep drinking, keep wiring their houses, keep electrifying their carriages, and keep wanting their spirits clean. Copper answers all four, and answers them still.

Sell your Bare Bright bright, keep your still scoured, and remember: the metal in your scrap pile has likely already made someone a fine glass of whiskey, and will yet again.

Yours in the red metal, from the tooth-pulling chair beside the caged bear,
— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins