About the Montague Bookmill, and a few beers in the Massachusetts countryside.

I'm gradually describing (and backdating) the Curmudgeons' eastern road trip, with cultural highlights usually recorded at NAC, and beers here at PC.

Eastern USA Road Trip 2016, Day 5: Ruby welcomes the Confidentials to Massachusetts.

On Saturday morning, we drove from Brattleboro, Vermont to South Hadley, Massachusetts, which didn't take very long, and my wife Diana enjoyed a long-awaited (well, five months) meeting with her niece's baby.

Later that same day, we all piled into one car to visit another niece. The choice of venue was near and dear of the heart of this drinking reader: A bookstore with food, beer and tunes.

It's hard not to like a bookstore with a tag like this: Books you don't need in a place you can't find. Accordingly, the Montague Bookmill is a used bookstore housed in an 1842 grist mill, located along the highway somewhere north of Amherst, Massachusetts.

This article summarizes the attraction.

Montague Bookmill is a hidden gem with books and beer, by Jon Mael (Boston Globe)

Part treehouse, part shopping center, part historical site, and part dining destination. The Montague Mill is impossible to categorize. But it’s entirely cool and timeless. Nice views, used books, and good food don’t go out of style.

The mill serves a diverse clientele including families seeking a fun day out, tourists, and college students longing for a quiet place away from the hustle and bustle of their busy campuses. Five businesses share the space on the banks of the Sawmill River, which flows into the Connecticut River a few miles downstream ...

In addition to the bookstore, there is a casual cafe, slightly upscale restaurant, record store and artists' collective, all situated in the old mill complex.

If memory serves, my beer choice was an IPA and a Porter, both from the region. The names weren't recorded and are lost to posterity. Perhaps I should have posted to untappd.

It was a relaxed and eclectic afternoon, and soon we returned home to dine on a meal of grilled beef, corn and tomatoes, washed down with cans of Hermit Thrush. Here are two photos of the bookstore cribbed from the Internetz:

And another one I took. The afternoon was so laid back that I couldn't be bothered to exercise the camera.

At some point in the evening, the husband of Diana's niece observed that a brewery nearby made a Rauchbier.

Sunday was going to be fun.

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