Hodgdon Varget

Hodgdon Varget is a medium-burning extruded powder and is part of Hodgdon’s Extreme line of powders. It is also one of the most popular rifle powders made.

As a medium-burning rifle powder, it does best in common cartridges like the .223 Remington and .308 Winchester. People will also use it in slightly more over-bore cartridges like the 30-06, 7mm-08, and the 6.5 Creedmoor.

What makes Varget a superior choice above most of its competitors is its extreme temperature stability. Temperature stability is the ability to produce nearly the same muzzle velocity regardless of the ambient temperature.

While no powder is completely temperature stable, Varget is more-or-less as close as one can get. Even swings of 100 degrees Fahrenheit will produce single-digit velocity changes. Now, hopefully, you never see this in a single day. But it does mean a single accurate load can be worked up and used year-round for long-range shooting.

Hodgdon Varget For Sale

This is more important for competitive shooters than it is for most hunters, as competitions are generally held year-round. And, as many competitive shooters have learned, leaving ammunition in direct sunlight during summer can make the cartridges hot enough to cause discomfort when handling.

Varget gives excellent case fill when used in .233 Remington and .308 Winchester. At max loading, it usually results in a compressed charge.

There is one big downside to Varget though, it’s a victim of its own success. As most reloaders know, when the shooting public goes nuts with gun and ammo buying, reloading components can go out of stock for years. Varget is one of the worst examples of this.

If you try Varget and like it, it is a wise choice to keep a hefty reserve should it be unavailable for up to 2-3 years.

hodgdon varget in stock

Caveats on Extruded Powders: Varget is an extruded powder, meaning the physical form of the powder is that of small pellets. This has both some benefits and drawbacks. Extruded powders, generally speaking, are the top choice for reloaders chasing accuracy and temperature stability.

The drawback of extruded powders is they do not flow like spherical powders. With each pellet being larger in size, this can lead to less consistent weights when metered from a powder dispenser or even worse, complete stoppages as the pellets bind together in the hopper.

This can be overcome by a number of little tricks reloaders do, such as flicking the powder reservoir with their finger, or any other number of ways to manually agitate the pellets. The other options are to weigh every charge or use powder dippers.

Extruded powders can also struggle to easily flow into small-caliber cases. With .30 caliber cases, this is a mild annoyance at best. With .22 caliber cases, almost every charge needs to be “encouraged” not to bind at the mouth of the case. Reloading 6.5mm cases are somewhere in between.