Sweet sparkling cider help?

So I have a few gallons of Apple cider fermenting and this is my first time making cider. I am wanting to make a somewhat sweet sparkling cider but I dont want to use artificial sweetener. So I am planning to back sweeten when bottling and Waiting for carbonation to build up and then stove top paturize before all of the sugar is gone. So I was wondering if I could get some insight as to how much sugar I should add? What kind of sugar? And most importantly how long should I wait before I pasturize? So that it is sweet but not a still cider. Thanks for any help.

>How much sugar should you use

This would vary depending on how sweet you wanted it to be. Your definition of semi sweet could be different form somebody else so I would experiment with this yourself.

>What kind of sugar

Pretty much any sugar will work. Lots of people use brown sugar or cane sugar. Another is apple juice concentrate. Most people use 2-3 cans per 5 gallons of cider, depending on desired sweetness. Old Orchard makes an apple cherry concentrate. I bought an apple cherry and apple passion mango to see which one i liked better and I thought the apple passion mango was really tasty so I might end up using that. The apple cherry tasted too berry-ish for me.

>How long should I wait

This is gonna depend on how carbonated you want. A lot of people fill up 1 or 2 plastic bottle with their cider because it's easier to gauge carbonation in a plastic bottle. When it carbs up, the bottle will get hard and expand and you can feel how firm it gets. You can pour it out and see how carb'd it looks in a glass, etc. I would probably use the same sized plastic bottle as your glass one as well as filling it up to the same fullness for consistency.

Sweeten to taste with your preferred back-sweetener, measure the SG, then add another 0.003-0.004 points worth of sweetener which is the amount of sugar consumed by most yeasts to properly carbonate a bottle.

Follow the great pasteurization stickey at the top of the cider forum and definitely use plastic soda bottles as a guide.

irchowi said:

...I bought an apple cherry and apple passion mango to see which one i liked better and I thought the apple passion mango was really tasty so I might end up using that...

Click to expand...

I love juice concentrates with passion fruit. The aroma is usually fantastic.