I too would love a clone recipe for this drink. I have played around with adding brown sugar or molassass to my primary ferment but to my taste buds it always seems to come out tasting bitter after fermenting. I am starting to think the way to go is to ferment a cider with a yeast you like and then back sweeten with a simple syrup of bown sugar and water, or mollasass.
FYI brown sugar is just white sugar with molassass mixed back in.
I too find that fermenting brown sugar or molassass seems to make the cider bitter.
I think however I have found a good recipe to make a clone of Spire Dark & Dry.
Here is what I did.
5 gallons Walmart apple juice
5 cups white sugar
SG was about 1.060
Added Red Star Pasteur champagne yeast
( This stuff ferments like crazy and is hard to cold crash I regret I had to use sorbate and campden tablets to stop the 5 gallon batch, but had no problem stopping the a 1 gallon batch with out the chemicals.)
When the gravity reached 1.020 i cold crashed. FG was 1.013 when I finnaly got it to stop.
I let it age three months and then racked it into a corny keg and placed the keg into the keggerator.
set it and forget it at 10psi for a couple of weeks.
Now here is where the molassass comes in.
Poured about two onces into a glass and added a teaspoon of mollassass and stirred. Topped of the glass with more cider to about 12 ounces total and gave it a gentle stir. I drank this while I was working on the computer and was surprised that it went down so smoothly and quickly!
There was no bitter taste at all like i had found when I tried to ferment the molassass. I hope someone finds this usefull.
Muduff
