My first cider, a few questions for the pros

Hi everyone, I've been brewing for a few years now but this was my first real attempt at a cider/cyser and I was hoping you could help me out with a few things.

First: I just transferred my cider to the secondary yesterday and I've decided I want to spice it up a bit. How do you recommend I sterilize cinnamon sticks or similar spices before adding them to my secondary fermenter? Is sterilization necessary or recommended at this stage?

Second: I used super-rich cider straight from the orchard and 6lbs of honey straight from a bee farm. The honey was like $45, which I didn't mind paying because I want this cider to be the bees knees, so to speak. But after tasting it yesterday it turned out much stronger than I had expected. I used safeale 05, so I knew it would be strong, but I thought there would still be a good amount of residual sweetness and I just didn't taste it. Once it conditions and the alcohol heat mellows a bit, will some of that honey flavor come through, or should I just use cheap store bought honey for fermentation and post-sweeten with the expensive stuff next time?

Any help or suggestions are appreciated, thank you in advance for your help and for welcoming me into your community.

Yep, save the xpensive stuff for backsweetening. Safale can chew through a lot of sugar-up to 13%+.

You actually made a cyser and you should probably be able to taste a little bit of the honey flavor. If you age it appropriately more mead flavor will come through.

You made a good choice on your yeast. If you think 05 tastes hot wait till you make/try edworts applewine with lalvin ec1118.

Yeast doesn't much care how much you got sucker for the sugar they consume. Always remember that.

I made a fall cider with nutmeg ginger and cinnamon. What I did was take a pot, boil water and ad spices. Boil for a few minutes and it will extract flavor and sterilize. Then I added it all to the primary and when its done rack to secondary. This is the first time doing it and I feel the ginger overpowered it. I'm actually drinking one now, its still pretty good.

I would only use 2 sticks for no more then five minutes boil.

How much of each spice did you use Jon112?

I use ground cinnamon, and nutmeg and cloves, but sticks can be very easy t o use. Try one stick, and taste after a week or so. The spice flavors will intensify over time, so taste it every 3 to 4 days and rack off or remove the cinnamon when you reach your desired level.

Spicing is a type of preserving so Bacteria doesn't really live in them, which means you don't need to worry about it contaminating your brew

This is all extremely helpful, thank you so much to all of you.