There are no existing images of Peter Hemings (nor of his more famous older sister) and no accounts written in his own hand or by anyone who might have considered him a peer. Peter Hemings is only knowable as the valued piece of property of a figure of historical importance. His accomplishments are given by the processes of history-making to Thomas Jefferson, who on April 25, 1815 wrote, “I am lately become a brewer for family use, having had the benefit of instruction to one of my people by an English brewer of the first order.”

Though overseen by Jefferson, “Peter must have had some latitude with the brewing process,” according to Jack Gary, Director of Archaeology and Landscapes at Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest.

On June 26, 1815, Jefferson wrote to Miller a few years after he trained Peter Hemings, “Our brewing of the last autumn is generally good, altho’ not as rich as that of the preceding year, the batch which Peter Hemings did for Mr. Bankhead was good, and the brewing of corn which he did here after your departure would have been good, but that he spoiled it with over-hopping.”

“The question is,” Gary mused, “did Peter actually spoil it, was he trying something new, or was he brewing to his tastes?”

Jefferson’s records reveal that barley was not grown on either of his properties and what recipes for beer have been recorded feature wheat-dominant grists. I imagined the cloudy, aggressively-hopped beer that Hemings may have “spoiled,” and wondered if perhaps he was a visionary, brewing 200 years ahead of his time.

“Regardless, he was the one doing the work,” Gary continued. “Just like cooking for white families where African-American cooks certainly added their own spices and contributions to meals, it was probably also happening with brewing.”

With several years of experience, Peter Hemings came into his own as a maltster and brewer, and may have taught these trades to other enslaved men in Virginia. On April 11, 1820, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison, “Our brewing for the use of the present year has been some time over. About the last of Oct. or beginning of Nov. we begin for the ensuing year and malt and brew three, 60-gallon casks successively which will give so many successive lessons to the person you send… I will give you notice in the fall when we are to commence malting and our malter and brewer is uncommonly intelligent and capable of giving instruction if your pupil is as ready at comprehending it.”

What is clear and difficult to reconcile is Jefferson’s obvious recognition of Hemings’ talent. In 1821, James Barbour (former U.S. Senator, U.S. Secretary of War, Virginia Governor, and namesake of Barboursville, VA) wrote to Jefferson, asking for a recipe for the ale he drank during one of his visits to Monticello. Jefferson replied, “I have no receipt for brewing, and I much doubt if the operations of malting and brewing could be successfully performed from a receipt. A Captain Miller now of Norfolk...he had been a brewer in London, and undertook to teach both processes to a servt. of mine, which during his stay here and one or two visits afterwards in the brewing season, he did with entire success. I happened to have a servant of great intelligence and diligence both of which are necessary.”

Dr. Kelley Fanto Deetz, historian and author of Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine, suggests that Jefferson wasn’t alone in recognizing the talent and cultural ability of the people enslaved in colonial Virginia. She says an appreciation of the cultural contributions of enslaved African-Americans was widespread—found, for example, in letters from mistresses to one another, and that slave-owning families benefited so much from enslaved labor that “the convenience of slavery outweighed the morality of condemning it.”