Hodgdon Varget

The Do-All Varmint Cartridge Powder

- John Haviland

Varget is a great powder for reduced velocity loads, such as the .25-06 Remington with Sierra 70-grain BlitzKing bullets at a slow 3,300 fps.

Settling on one powder to load in an array of varmint hunting cartridges certainly simplifies handloading. I did that decades ago by selecting IMR-4320, which provided great performance in my .22-250, 6mm and .25-06 Remingtons and several big-game cartridges.

When I started handloading for the .22-250 in the 1980s, I experimented with several popular powders for the cartridge. Maximum amounts of W-748 and IMR’s 3031, 4064 and 4320 gave Speer 52-grain bullets a muzzle velocity between 3,500 and 3,600 feet per second. Jim Carmichel, in his book, The Modern Rifle (1975), wrote of the .22-250: “My favorite handload is one of the 52-or 53-grain benchrest-grade bullets made by Hornady, Speer, Sierra, Nosler etc., backed by 38 grains of IMR4320. This goes close to 3800 fps in a 26-inch barrel and will usually squeeze the last dollop of accuracy any rifle has to offer.”

Varget’s relative burn rate is somewhat faster than Ramshot TAC and Alliant Reloder 10x.