The SMM Price List Speaks: Bare Bright Holds at $6.25

Step up, friends, and mind the ledger! The men at SMM have posted their price list of copper-scrap once more, and I confess I never tire of the sight — column upon column of the red metal weighed, graded, and reckoned in honest figures. It is a modern ritual, this daily naming of copper's worth, though I assure you the reverence behind it is as old as the first alchemist who ever coaxed a green ore into a gleaming ingot.

Here at home our own #1 Bare Bright stands at about $6.25 the pound, with the broader market nudged up a whisker — a tenth of one percent. A modest step, I grant you, but copper does not need theatrics to prove its value. It only need be useful, and no metal has ever been more so.

Consider, if you will, the still. I have spent a lifetime near barrels and the men who empty them — my old Fort Wilkins had a caged bear and a tooth-pulling chair, but the true magic was always in the copper worm coiling behind the bar. Every clean whiskey, every smooth brandy, every jug of respectable mountain moonshine owes its character to copper. The pot still, the alembic of the monastery cellars, the Appalachian coppersmith's coil — all lean upon one quiet truth: copper seizes the sulfur and the foul volatiles from the rising vapor and lets them go no farther. Fill a still with cold stainless and you get spirit that reeks of struck matches and regret. Copper alone renders liquor fit for a gentleman's glass. Centuries of distillers have known it, and no chemist has ever unseated the red metal from that throne.

And that is but one of its lives! The same copper that purifies your dram runs invisible through the walls as electrical wire, carries clean water in your plumbing, lines the bottom of your good cookware, and greens gracefully upon a well-kept roof. In this electric age it hums inside every motor, every humming hall of machines they call a data center, every one of these electric carriages the young folk are so proud of. From the counterstamped cent passed hand to hand in a saloon to the conductor that lights a city — always copper, always faithful.

So when you cart your Bare Bright, your #2, your bright bundles of wire and your weathered brass to the yard, know you are trading in no ordinary commodity. You are trading in the very substance that makes good liquor possible and modern life electric. Weigh it proud. At $6.25 the pound, the people's metal is holding its head high.

Keep your copper bright and your spirits brighter.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins