Hornady .308 Winchester Brass, 100 ct

Hornady brass is the sensible middle of the .308 market: a single known headstamp with real uniformity claims behind it, at a price that does not require you to chase ten firings to justify the purchase. Hornady manufactures cases to what it describes as extremely tight tolerances on wall thickness, with consistent weight and capacity so cases are virtually identical and tight wall concentricity throughout. It also runs cases through a pressure calibration test to confirm uniform expansion during firing, and produces them in smaller lots held to strict quality standards. In practice that gives you the thing that actually matters for load development, which is a batch of cases that behave the same as each other, without paying the premium for maximum case life. The honest comparison against Lapua is this: Lapua's published emphasis is on hard-drawn heads and annealed necks, which is a durability and case-life story, while Hornady's is on dimensional and capacity uniformity. Neither publishes numbers, so treat any head-to-head durability claim skeptically and pick on price and availability.