Beginner at Cider Making, Making First Batch Tomorrow

I am a beginner at cider making. I have done a few brews of beer that turned out nicely.

Now I have the cider kit from mr beer. I am not using the cider ingredients in the kit. I have my own ingredients. Basically using the 2 gallon fermenter and that's it. So I am making a 2 gallon brew.

Ingredients:
2 gallons of 100% organic apple cider from whole foods
Brown sugar
100% organic maple syrup
Organic cinnamon sticks

Basically I would like to hear your opinion on how you would make this 2 gallon batch. How much of each ingredient you would put in. I have an idea on what I would do but would like to hear others comments.

I plan on putting all of it in at once on a nice simmer in a pot for about 45 minutes so everything is nicely mixed. Then let it cool down to yeast pitching temperature (which is what for cider?), put it in the fermenter, and pitch the yeast. Now right now I plan on using the yeast that mr beer provides. Will that be fine? I have a homebrewers type shop in town but they don't have a whole lot of yeast to pick from and most is wine yeast. I would like your opinion on that too. Use mr beer or wine yeast? Would you use 1 packet or 2?

I have heard that cinnamon can alter yeast in some ways which is why I got organic sticks. They come in a glass container with about 11, 3 inch tall sticks. Would you put it in the pot with the syrup and sugar or put it in at a different time, maybe after fermentation?

Bottling is another question I have, after fermentation, is it just like beer? Using corn sugar? Can someone explain this process for what to happen post fermentation?

One more thing, since the cider and all ingredients going in is organic with no preservatives, do I need to do anything to the cider before brew or is mixing in the pot at a simmer good enough?

I plan on using mr beer as my r&d type batches and when I have a good batch/recipe, make a bigger 5 gallon batch.

Cheers

A few things to think about before starting your batch:

1. I would avoid heating up your cider, unless it is a tiny bit of it used to mix some ingredient that can't be stirred/shaken. I've made ciders with brown sugar and maple syrup and you can just put it all in your gallon container with some AJ and just shake it up until it's all mixed.

2. As for yeast, that is your decision depending on what kind of cider you want. Different yeasts have different temperature ranges, and you can look these up online to get the specific details for each. A wine or champagne yeast will take your cider very dry and usually take longer to age and mellow, giving it a more "winey" characteristic. Ale yeasts aren't as aggressive and usually require lower temperatures to ferment without tasting funky. I would personally recommend Nottingham ale yeast (most people on here have had excellent results on here and is probably the most popular yeast used for cider)...tends to leave more residual sweetness/apple flavor and can be drinkable a lot sooner. Typically the packets of yeast in LHBS's are good for a 5gal batch.

3. If you want to impart cinnamon flavor then I would ferment the cider in primary and rack to secondary on the cinnamon sticks.

4. Bottling - you can prime like beer (I do 3/4 cup of cane sugar for a 5gal batch, corn or any other fermentable sugar works fine too). Or you can bottle pasteurize if you want to have a sweet sparkling cider, see https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f32/easy-stove-top-pasteurizing-pics-193295/

5. For organic cider to kill wild yeast you use campden tablets and let it sit with that for at least a day before pitching yeast.


My advice: For your first cider, I'd keep it simple. Maybe just try doing straight apple juice with yeast. Then if you can make a solid end product, add some other spices/sugar and vary it a little. Adding more sugar will mean more alcohol and a relatively drier cider, just to keep you aware. It will also be a lot harsher at first which means it will need more time to age to mellow out. Plus, if you add a good amount of sugar and syrup you could be looking at a cider in the 8-10% range, which is pretty strong, whereas most store-bought AJ will give you something around or a little over 6% when fermented dry.

But anyways, that's just, like, my opinion man

I just started another batch myself yesterday, here is the link to the post if you want to check it out. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f32/quck-simple-cider-nottingham-yeast-437568/.

Thanks for the response. I will take your comments into consideration.
Appreciate it.