Buckwheat Honey Cider

Hi. I've brewed a few batches of beer before, but never a cider. Here's what I have:

5 gallons fresh cider
1/2 pound buckwheat honey
Yeast nutrient
Yeast energizer
Red Star champagne yeast

My plan was to pasteurize the fresh cider, add the nutrient, energizer and yeast and plop it in the primary for a few weeks. When I transfer to the secondary I was going to add the 1/2 gallon of buckwheat honey- let that go for another few weeks. Then prime and bottle.

My goal is a dry cider with abv ~7%

Does this sound like a decent plan? Should I add some sweetener along with the cider in the primary?

Thanks for any help! I've never used nutrient or energizer before, so I'm a bit out of my element.

EDIT: Deleted double post. Mobile app locked up.

Hey Fiddle. First welcome to the forum. You'll learn a lot here. I know I have.

It sounds like technically you're making a cyser (apple juice + honey). I've never made one myself, but it's in the cards. I do think your general plan outlined above will work, but for your first foray into the cyser world I would recommend finding a recipe here in the forum (under the recipes section) and just following that. It'll be a lot simpler than winging it, and you can be confident you'll end up with something good.

Also, how were you planning to pasteurize the cider? Have you considered using campden tablets or just the powdered kmeta rather than pasteurizing?

Hi Texas!
I didn't get around to getting this in the primary until now. I ended up just doing a pretty basic cider from one of the recipes on the site, like you suggested. Thanks for the advice! Maybe I'll get more experimental with a smaller batch

I used campden tabs instead of pasteurizing.

-TF

TheFiddles said:

Hi Texas!
I didn't get around to getting this in the primary until now. I ended up just doing a pretty basic cider from one of the recipes on the site, like you suggested. Thanks for the advice! Maybe I'll get more experimental with a smaller batch

I used campden tabs instead of pasteurizing.

-TF

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Thanks for the update. Makes me feel really good when someone finds my blabbering helpful!