Thank you for this thread, it is very useful. Yes, I sat and read through most of it yesterday and today. And since I have had one carboy just liberated (bottled the English Ale that was in it this morning) I decided to make cider. I've made wine, beer and mead but not cider so far.
Picked 6 gallons of apple cider from a local orchard. It's preservative-free, but also pasteurized. For some reason they won't sell non-pasteurized cider to me.
Well, anyway. Tested the SG, it's pretty low at 1.043. I calculated that I need to add about 55g/L of fermentable sugars to get it to around 1.065. For 6 gallons, that's over 3lbs of honey. I picked 2 jars of Trader Joe's Turkish honey, that's 3lbs together. Added them to the cider - used only 5.5 gallons plus the honey that does have its own volume, filled my 6gal carboy nicely with a little head space (maybe 1qt or so). The SG with the honey added is 1.062, pretty good I think.
I added a Campden tablet, that's 0.4g of K-meta, put the airlock on and will let it stand until tomorrow to see what happens. Ideally I won't see any fermentation going on at 24h.
If all goes well, tomorrow I'll add a packet of Nottingham Ale and let'er rip. My local brewer's supplies shop still carries the Nottingham at old prices, dunno how but it's current stock. Can't complain.
Now I realize that with so low an OG and so much honey added (1/3 of the fermentable bill) I will probably end up with something closer to a cyser than cider. That's OK with me.
I plan to crash and rack it around SG 1.010.
Picture: right: bucket-o-mead, left: carboy-o-cider-to-be