The Red Metal Climbs in May, and the Alembic Approves

Well now, the good folk at EUWID Recycling and Waste Management report that copper scrap prices are rising again as May opens her doors — and though our own daylight market slipped a trifling 0.8 percent on the day, do not let that small stumble fool you. The tide of the red metal runs in but one direction across the long years, and it is up. Bare Bright fetches near $6.24 the pound here in the States as I set down this dispatch, and a scrapper who has stripped clean wire ought to walk to the yard with his chin held high.

Rising scrap is not mere numbers on a broker's slate. It is the whole world hollering at once for the conductor. Every electric carriage that hums down the avenue, every humming hall of thinking-machines they call a data center, every motor and every mile of water line and roof and gutter — all of it thirsts for copper, and there is only so much of it to be dug and, blessedly, salvaged. That is why the honest trade of the scrap man matters. Your #1, your #2, your insulated wire and radiator brass — you are feeding the age.

But you know the corner of the workshop where my heart truly warms. It is the still. Ask any distiller worth his mash why the pot still and the alembic have been beaten from copper since the monks first coaxed spirit out of wine in their stone cellars. It is no accident, no habit, no mere fashion. Copper reacts — it seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising vapor and binds them fast, so that what drips from the worm is clean, sweet, and fit for a Christian throat. A stainless vessel is a handsome, lifeless thing; it cannot do this alchemy. Every good whiskey, every brandy, every jug of honest Appalachian moonshine owes its virtue to the red metal's living chemistry. When copper climbs in price, know that the moonshiner and the master distiller alike will still pay it gladly, for there is no substitute.

I have loved this metal my whole theatrical life. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and watched them pass hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England — my own Fort Wilkins among them, bear and tooth-pulling chair and all. Copper was the people's metal then; it is the world's metal now.

So when the ledger dips a fraction, smile. The alembic still drinks copper. The wire still drinks copper. The whole electrified age drinks copper. And a rising May is merely the metal remembering its worth.

Keep your Bare Bright bright.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins