This may be my ignorance - or lack of imagination - but why would anyone need to pasteurize bottles of cider that have been primed for carbonation. There is no more sugar left to ferment if you ferment dry and then prime with a fixed and known quantity of sugar. Of course, if you don't ferment dry and try to use the residual sugar as your priming sugar then you have no really good idea the pressure that you are subjecting the bottles to as the CO2 produced by the yeast increases. That's a bit like blowing the tires on your car each time you want to stop rather than pressing on your brakes. Failure to allow complete fermentation seems to me to be a peculiarly poor way of making cider. There are ways of creating a sweeter cider that allow you far more control of the process.
If you want a sweet cider, with carbonation, not using artificial sweeteners and lack the means to force carbonate in a keg, you're kinda stuck going with backsweetened, bottle carbed and pasteurized cider.
Basically, you ferment dry, then add flavors and/or sugars and bottle. Since the flavors (usually fruit juice or apple juice concentrate which will contain sugar) and/or additional sugar of some type that you add will go right on past the amount of priming sugar you'd need, it's easy to get too much carbonation. The trick is to fill a plastic soda bottle with the cider. When the cider has carbed to the point that the bottle is firm like a store bought soda, you open one of the glass bottles. If the level of carbonation is suitable, you pasteurize. If not, you test another bottle every day or so until you get the right level of carbonation, then pasteurize. I reference the 111 page sticky in this forum.
as for the question at hand:
Thanks. I'm new at this. I was under the impression that even though the sugar in primary has been completely converted, that the yeasts will "wake up" when you add sugar at bottling time. That leads to carbonation, as I understand it, and I don't want that. I want to force carbonate. So, if the secondary ferments totally dry (no more bubbles) can I safely add sugar for taste without adding chemicals or doing pasteurization?
It's a small batch and will be refrigerated and consumed in a short period of time.
The yeast, if not killed off or filtered out, will indeed wake up if sugar is present and the temperature is right. Where you are in the process doesn't matter.
Force carbonation is outside my limited knowledge, but if you want it sweet, you'll likely either have to kill the yeast first or use artificial sweeteners. Again, I would not accept my word for it, but that's what I would venture to guess.
As for refrigeration, it's at least possible to sweeten a cider with "sugar" and keep it cold (like under 40 degrees F) and you'll be fine. If the temperature rises, though, the yeast could wake up and begin making CO2 again...
