aluminum vs solid wood interior??

[Andrew Hagen]

I'm in the drawing up/planning stage of building a vertical electric smoker. I plan on roughly 4' tall x 30"W x 30"D smoke chamber and an attached 2' tall or so heat chamber below that. Seems to be a fairly popular style for a semi-mobile smokehouse. I've read a lot on here about smokehouse builds do's and don'ts, so thank you all for that. I know for hot smoking, plywood is a no-go. I plan to primarily hot smoke sausages, snack sticks, etc, along with having the ability to cold smoke some things. Anyways, my original plan was to use unfinished 3/4" pine tongue and groove boards to line the smoke chamber as I have them laying around. I see a lot of builds line the interior with aluminum. Is the aluminum used only because they used plywood in their build? Would I want to put aluminum over the T&G pine if I used that? I just can't find anywhere if a solid wood interior is better/worse than one lined with aluminum. Thank you.