The Burn

The world is a complicated place and if you have tried to pick out a muzzleloader propellant lately it is really complicated. A guy has never had more choices or had to wade through more marketing B.S. to arrive at the perfect powder to send bullets on their way.

An over-achieving muzzleloading writer, after months of extensive testing, chronographing and hours of pondering the possibilities, would create a propellant-performance matrix which would assign numeric values to all the different properties possessed by each. While I am not the over-achieving-type, I can offer a few shortcuts for choosing the perfect propellant. There are three things to consider: price, performance and ease of use.

The first big choice is between pellets or loose powder. Pellets get high marks for ease of use and performance. Hodgdon, in a very prescient move, patented the cylindrical pellet that drops down the bore. Other companies must preform charges into 'sticks' that are oversized and must be forced down the bore. My experience with sticks has been erratic at best. Loose powder must be carefully measured out, but with speed loaders is as easy to transport in the field as pellets.

Generally speaking, loose powder will turn in higher velocities when shot side by side with pellets. Most importantly, loads can be tuned to the individual rifle or bullet since you can add five grains here or take away 10 grains there. The ability to accurately meter the loads is dependent on flake/granule shapes and should be considered as well. While some brands are more durable than others, loose powder is more fragile and if allowed to rock back and forth in a speed loader all day will eventually break down. When the flakes or granules abrade and change shape, burn rates change. Most propellants are hygroscopic and essentially beg for humidity to change their burn rates. Canisters of loose propellant have a slight edge since they can be better sealed.

For quite a few years, most manufacturers sought to make propellants more energetic to increase velocities. In addition to producing higher velocities, they addressed fouling, ease of clean up, consistency, ease of ignition and shelf life at the same time. The catch is that the new propellants cost more. Remember, loose is almost always cheaper to shoot than pellets, sometimes dramatically so, and that equation depends a lot on your preferred charge weight.

If my math is correct one of the most expensive new propellants on the market is Blackhorn 209 and in this case, expensive means good, damn good. Introduced by Western Powders in 2008, the propellant exemplifies everything that is good about the judicious application of technology. It is high-tech stuff that turns in a pretty amazing performance. Don Luhr, Western's ballistic lab manager, explained that Blackhorn is difficult to make, hence the cost.

"It is an extruded product, which is a lot tougher to manufacture than granular powders," Luhr said. "Components are compressed into malleable blocks, pushed through an extruder then cut to length. The shape, length, and even the hole through the middle all help to control burn characteristics."