First cider recipe...any tips?

Hello everyone. I just formulated my first cider recipe, but I wanted to get your input before I bought the ingredients. Any help is appreciated!

6 gallons 100% non-pasteurized cider with no preservatives
0.5 gallons of water with 6 cups of dark brown sugar dissolved
1 Lemon
5 green cardamom pods, crushed
handful of roasted french oak chips
White Labs Liquid Starter - English Cider Yeast
3/4 Cup Corn Sugar

Heat the 6 gallons of cider over medium for 45 minutes, adding cardamom pods after 15 minutes. Add to the fermenter along with roasted oak chips.
Heat up the 0.5 gallons of water to a boil, and then dissolve the sugar in the water. Add the juice from the lemon to the sugar solution. Once dissolved, add the sugar/lemon mixture to the cider in the fermenter. Pitch yeast and let sit for two weeks. Rack to secondary fermenter and let sit for another week. Once the sediment has settled, prime and bottle. Let age for at least 2 months.

What do you think?

If you go with pastuerized (heat sterilized) but preservative free apple cider you won't have to boil it. All the bugs in it are dead.

Also, you can dissolve the brown sugar in a 2-3 qaurts of you apple juice over heat, and leave out the 1/2gal of water.

I don't have a mental picture of the spice blend. I would be inclined to leave all the spices out (lemon, oak, cardamom) until primary was complete, then add the spices (without even racking) and leave it to bulk age on the yeast cake until the spiciness was about right. Then bottle.

Is the 3/4 cup corn sugar for priming/bottling?

If you have tried that recipe and the brewer gave you the recipe, great. Otherwise I would suggest a scaled down 2-3 gallon test batch.

I have never made a cider that reached its peak in under 6 months, and those are limited to graff style iders with a bunch of yeast nutrient in the barley portion.

If you do make it don't dump it out until it has been cellared at least one year.

Don't let me talk you out of it, it might be great.

Peace.

I wouldn't boil the cider, just get it to a slight simmer which will do just the same thing (sterilisation). If you do want to boil it, you'll want to buy some pectinase (pectic enzyme) to remove the cloudiness. Other than that, sounds delicious.