Expert Advice: The Best All Around Hunting Rifle Caliber

By Andrew Jackson Outdoor Empire www.outdoorempire.com

My hunting friends love to rib each other about their favorite calibers.

A particularly sharp rivalry is between my love of 6.5mm caliber cartridges (such as 6.5 Grendel and .260 Remington) and my best friend’s focus on .308 Winchester, which is an excellent round in its own right.

If I had to pick just one cartridge to hunt almost any animal in North America, though?

I wouldn’t choose either .308 Win or my beloved 6.5 Grendel.

The best hunting rifle caliber for most hunters is the .270 Winchester. It’s powerful enough for elk and moose but can be tamed down for coyotes and Sitka deer. It’s also a popular enough hunting ammo to find it available for sale even at small outfitters.

What makes this cartridge so great?

Let’s delve into why the .270 is such a versatile caliber.

What’s Important in the Best Hunting Cartridge?

A good hunting round has the qualities necessary for you to harvest your chosen game reliably.

An excellent hunting caliber will allow you to hunt as many animals as possible.

This will let you stick to just one rifle for all of your hunting needs, saving you money and taking advantage of your familiarity with the weapon.

These qualities distill down to four words:

• Power

• Range

• Versatility

• Availability

.270 Winchester comfortably hits all four of these points.

Impact Power

When you shoot an animal, the bullet has to penetrate the animal and transfer the kinetic energy into the animal’s flesh and organs. This is what I mean by “impact power.”

A caliber that’s too small for your game won’t penetrate far enough to cause lethal damage.

This can result in a wounded animal escaping from your attempts to track it down, wasting your time, and leaving the animal to succumb to a painful death by disease if it cannot recover.

The .270 Winchester, with the right bullet selection, is powerful enough for every animal in North America. It’s often used for large game such as elk and moose.

It can even be used for grizzlies, if you load your rifle with a heavy-for-caliber round and don’t mind a shoulder bruise! Also, since .270 Winchester is such a popular hunting round, it benefits from all the hunting-related technological advancements every bullet manufacturer has developed.

A modern projectile such as the Hornady ELD-X bullet will deliver devastating impacts at ranges our grandfathers only wished they could shoot.

Which leads us to…

Effective Range

Hunting bullets need to hit the animal hard, and they have to do so at a range that matches the terrain in which you’re hunting.

Let’s take elk for example.

Unless you’re lucky enough to be hunting in a thick forest, you’re looking at a 100-yard or longer shot. Who are we kidding? That elk will probably stay 300 yards away from you!

The popular rule of thumb for harvesting elk is that you need a minimum kinetic energy measurement of 1,500 foot-pounds.

A 130 gr Hornady SST Superformance .270 Winchester load will retain enough kinetic energy at 450 yards to ethically harvest elk.

.308 Winchester with a 150 gr Federal Vital-Shok bullet crosses that threshold just past 350 yards!

Keep that bullet selection in mind, though. A 130 gr Winchester Silvertip bullet from a .270 rifle drops under 1,500 ft-lbs just before 300 yards.

So, with the right ammo choice, you can ethically harvest the game at a shot distance, surpassing your average gun range. I hope you’ve practiced your long range hunting skills!

However, notice the words “effective range” instead of “maximum range.”

.270 Winchester is also commonly regarded as a flat-shooting cartridge. The bullet doesn’t drop much compared with heftier calibers such as .30-06.

In practice, this means .270 Win has an intuitive maximum point-blank range.

If you don’t know what MPBR is, this technique combines sighting your rifle to shoot high at a certain range so the projectile rises above the sightline and drops below. Why would you want this?

Your average deer has a 7-inch vital area. Hit anywhere in there and the deer will go down.

So, if you aim at the center of the vital area, it doesn’t matter if the bullet hits 3.5 inches high, 3.5 inches low, or anywhere in between.

With your average 130 gr .270 load, you can get this maximum point-blank range effect by zeroing your rifle 3″ high at 100 yards. The bullet won’t drop 3.5″ from your point of aim until past 300 yards!

Versatility

Remington Core-Lokt Tipped Centerfire Rifle Ammo

.270 Winchester is known as a medium to large game caliber. Did you know it can be a varmint cartridge, too?

Remington offers a 100 gr Core-Lokt load for the .270 Winchester. Norma beats this with their 96 gr EVOStrike lead-free ammo, which exceeds 3,500 feet per second. These light bullets are great for animals smaller than deer, such as coyotes. Though, this would be more for population control than for fur harvesting because a 100 gr bullet traveling at 3,000+ fps will dump a massive amount of kinetic energy.

And, if you want to be a madman flinging out 85 gr bullets at 3,800 fps, Barnes has loose TSX bullets available.

They’re intended for the 6.8 SPC cartridge but .270 Winchester uses the same .277 bullet size. Speer TNT Varmint bullets are a saner choice for use on varmints.

On the other hand, both Berger and Nosler sell 170 gr bullets. That’s twice as heavy as the lightest .270 bullets.

So, a .270 Winchester can take down a coyote and, with a different load, can offer adequate effectiveness against large and aggressive bears.

About the only ammo selection the .270 lacks is a dedicated match ammo. This isn’t a design deficiency, but is because the .270 Winchester is entrenched in everybody’s minds as a dedicated hunting round.

However, the adventurous reloader can use Sierra MatchKing or Hornady Match bullets for the 6.8 SPC.

(continued on page 28)