Assistant Cidermaker
(Wine Jobs:
Vineyards & Cellars )
Full Time
Salt Spring Island,
British Columbia
Reporting directly to the owners, the Assistant Cidermaker plays a leadership role in producing organic cider and related products at our small certified organic apple orchard and Ciderworks facility.
This management position is both supervisory and hands-on, so the Assistant Cidermaker must be prepared to direct staff and farm volunteers (WWOOFers) as well as working directly on production and – when necessary – in our orchard, nursery and lounge/tasting room.
The Assistant Cidermaker is involved in all aspects of cidermaking, including day-to-day hands-on work as well as ensuring that all production is safe, compliant with licensing requirements and our organic certification and fully documented, including the recording of lot and batch numbers, sanitation logs and more. This work involves a significant amount of repetition and is sometimes heavy.
During periods when cidermaking tasks are less demanding, the Assistant Cidermaker will be called on to carry out other duties in areas such as maintenance and upkeep of facilities and equipment, the production and sale of young apple trees through our small on-site nursery and serving customers in our lounge/tasting room. Additionally, there may be times when we will ask the Assistant Cidermaker to carry out tasks in our orchard.
To be successful, the Assistant Cidermaker must be well-organized, smart, flexible, good-natured, passionate and willing to work at a wide range of tasks. They must be healthy, able to carry heavy loads, willing to work hard and able to supervise and manage others in a positive manner. We are small but diverse and need our staff to be flexible and able to shift from one task to another on a moment’s notice.
This position requires that the person we hire live on Salt Spring Island, a rural community of about 12,000 people located between Vancouver and Victoria on British Columbia’s south coast. The community can be quiet, especially during the winter, so it is essential that you be happy to live in this sort of place.
In exchange for full-time-plus efforts five days per week, Salt Spring Apple Company Ltd. will pay the Assistant Cidermaker a salary of $1,600 biweekly. If the Assistant Cidermaker chooses to rent staff housing from us, we will deduct its cost from each pay cheque.
As a salaried management position, there is no additional payment for overtime or for working statutory holidays. The Assistant Cidermaker does receive two weeks of paid vacation time per 12 months of employment plus several additional paid days off in December of each year in recognition of working hard and productively throughout the year. The first three months on the job are probationary.
