Moose Milk - Favored by black-powder shooters everywhere

Moose milk is one of the easiest DIY gun products anyone can make - simply mix up some Ballistol with water. My preferred ratio is 1:4, but I’ve seen some use ratios as thin as 1:10 or 1:12 of Ballistol:water. I am a fan of the Zep professional sprayer bottles because they seem to always keep working, even after long periods of use. I don’t know where the name came from, but it does, in fact, look like milk.

Many black powder fans have come up with about as many variations on the recipe, some including stuff like PineSol, isopropyl alcohol and peroxide, along with Murphy’s oil soap. In my own experience just the 1:4 mix of Ballistol to water does the job decent enought, and I haven’t experimented with other recipes. The water dissolves the corrosive salts and softens the heavy fouling that occurs when shooting with black powder, and makes cleaning go a fair bit easier. The residual oils leave a thin, protective film.

Moose milk started with the black powder shooters in (I believe) the 70’s or 80’s, and it works well to clean and lubricate, without creating a nasty tar when mixed with the black powder fouling that typical gun cleaning solvents and oils do. Most petroleum based products create nothing but sadness when used on muzzleloaders, and it then becomes an absolute chore to clean.

Not only can it be used to clean your muzzleloader or cap and ball revolvers, it can be used as a patch lube. Simply soak your patches in it, squeeze out the excess, and wrap the lead round ball as you would a normal patch. Some like to soak their patches and let them dry, so that is also an option.

The beauty of Ballistol is that it emulsifies with water, and the mixture doesn’t separate. When it evaporates off, it leaves a thin, protective film on the gun, preventing rust. One variation of the recipe uses NAPA water soluble cutting fluid (#765-1526), but I haven’t tried it with anything other than Ballistol. As of this writing (2025), the NAPA cutting fluid is a bit less than half of what the Ballistol costs for a 1-gallon can, so I may have to try it and see how it does. Then again, looking at the SDS on the NAPA website makes it look a lot more toxic than the Ballistol, so perhaps not. One more interesting fact that I learned over the years is that Hoppes No. 9 bore solvent also emulsifies in water, but I’ve never tried to use that to clean any muzzleloaders. Either way, moose milk is one of very few exceptions to my “no CLP” rule.

One last interesting thing is that moose milk also seems to work quite well as a cutting fluid when operating a lathe or drilling.