“We’ll be last brewery in the US to use aluminum cans,” Lagunitas founder Tony Maguire tweeted in 2012. Maguire was shocked by the excesses of the aluminum industry, an earth-destroying enterprise preying on developing economies and potentially displacing good, sustainable, silica-based manufacturing of glass beer vessels. Or that’s what it looked like to him, at the time. We all have our own perspectives. We all have our own knowledges, composed of necessarily incomplete sets of facts, because no one can possibly know all the facts. We can know enough, individually or collectively, to rule out certain ideas, like fascism or Linkin Park fandom, but there are always things we might have gotten wrong.

It’s true that bauxite mining is incredibly energy-intensive, potentially toxic to the local environment, and ugly as hell to look at, which is why anyone who doesn’t recycle his beer cans is basically the monster from FernGully: The Last Rainforest. I mean it: Recycle your damn cans, or come November 9 I’ll tell everyone you know you voted for Trump, whether it’s true or not. I’m singling out the failure to recycle aluminum, rather than aluminum itself, because once you’ve pulled that aluminum out of the earth, it’s a by-God environmental miracle compared to glass. Consumers recycle it almost twice as reliably as they do glass, it takes less energy to recycle, recycled aluminum is easier to reuse in new beer vessels, and what’s not reused to enclose your delicious canned beer is in high demand for other industrial applications, like building cars, which you should not combine with your delicious canned beer.

And then there’s the shipping: A twelve-ounce beer, minus the container, weighs about three quarters of a pound no matter what it is or what it’s in. Short of your local brewery experimenting with dry-hopping its IPA with antimatter, we’re not reducing the weight of a twelve-pack below nine pounds, and those pounds add up fast in terms of fuel consumption, and therefore carbon emissions, when you’re shipping delicious beer across the country. (If your local brewery is about to dry-hop its IPA with antimatter, please ask them to stop, as they’re likely to obliterate the entire block they’re situated on and, more importantly, a fresh batch of IPA.) Cans weigh a mere fraction of what bottles do; this holiday evening, I invite you to verify that fact by downing a can of double IPA and a bottle of imperial stout and holding one empty vessel in each hand. You’ll feel the difference, and you’ll also feel really good.

So, okay, that’s a good socially conscious case for cans, but maybe the environmental benefits of cans seem a little nebulous to you. I get that. You’re only one person, after all, and changing your personal consumption habits is probably not going to save the world, and if it is, man, you might have to take a closer look at how much you’re consuming, and no one wants that. Let’s go back to the weight issue: I have very, very puny arms. Not so puny that I can’t carry a twelve-pack, bottles or cans, but when I think about all the twelve-packs I carry, and the distance I carry them, usually including at least two flights of stairs…. yeah, all that adds up. And suppose I bought those beers off the shelves at room temperature? I’m going to want one soon, and aluminum chills a hell of a lot faster than glass, and there’s virtually no chance I’m going to drop one in my eagerness and seriously injure myself.  (I’m not only weak, I’m also incredibly clumsy. But I know my limitations, which is also why the big five-gallon glass carboy I got as part of my homebrewing set is the only piece of equipment from that set I’ve never used.)

The case for cans gets a lot stronger if you’re outdoorsy. You want to go to the beach? Not if it’s a beach that allows glass bottles, you don’t. No matter how conscientious you are with your empties, you can’t trust the public at large not to break that shit over the top of the nearest hermit crab and leave the shattered glass and shell for you to cut your soles wide open on. You’re hiking? You don’t want to pack all that glass in, and you sure as hell don’t want to pack it out. Christ, even if the most ambitious expedition you can imagine is to the swimming pool in your cushy gated community, you don’t want to bring glass bottles with you. The HOA will hit you with a fine faster than you can say “endangering our children” and you’ll have that much less money to spend on beer.

Maybe you’re almost convinced. Maybe you’re thinking, “Sure, cans sound great, but aren’t they still kind of… I don’t know, low-class? Don’t they make the beer taste worse?” And, look, it’s hard not to associate cans with cheap, shitty beer if you grew up, like I did, in a time when pretty much only cheap, shitty beer was in cans, because canned beer tended to end up tasting like the can it was in. But today, in the era of can liners that actually work, BeerAdvocate’s fifth-best beer in the world, Heady Topper, is in cans. So is the seventh-best, King Julius. At the risk of inviting no-true-Scotsman accusations, I’ll say there’s probably not an OG American craft brewery that doesn’t can, these days: Sierra Nevada and Anchor do it; so do Stone, and Avery, and Bell’s, and Boston Beer Company, and now Lagunitas. I think their endorsement’s worth more than mine, but for what mine’s worth: No, drinking from cans won’t make you look like a rube.

So let’s come back to Lagunitas, which only just released its first canned beer: The 12th of Never Ale, because there’s no brewery better at self-deprecation than the makers of Lagunitas Sucks Holiday Ale. They’ve dressed the package up for its debut, with matching violet label and pop-tab. It pours a healthy-looking, slightly hazy straw-gold with a fluffy white head, and in the Lagunitas tradition, the nose is nothing but hops. How easy would it be to mistake this pale ale for an IPA? I’ve already done it at least twice trying to type this review up. The hops come in as extremely sharp citrus, with maybe a touch of ammonia. It’s an aggressive, bracing beer, but if you’re already a fan of Lagunitas, it’s one you could drink a lot of. And Tony Maguire seems to be betting you will, because as of right now, it’s only sold in kegs and twelve-packs.

To me, this is a perfectly fine beer and I could drink a fair number of cans of it, but it’s not the the best Lagunitas beer for daydrinking by a long shot. The hops are a little too honed toward citric-acid bitterness and there’s a chemical-ish note on the finish that makes it hard to take big gulps of. I’d rather be drinking cans of, say, Lagunitas DayTime than this, if such cans existed. But I think it’s more a commentary on the quality of Lagunitas’ portfolio than on this beer that I can instantly pull a better twelve-pack beer from memory. 12th of Never is nicely bitter and quenching and it’s damned refreshing cold. It’s worth a shot for any hophead looking for a tasty, low-maintenance beer to get her through the opening NFL weekend. Or that’s what I think, anyway. lady snow?

lady snow says: That’s good! What is that?

make it snow says: The 12th of Never. It’s a pale ale, but it hits like an IPA. Lagunitas said they’d be the last brewery in America to can their beer, and they weren’t, but close enough, right?

lady snow says: They held out a long time. It’s sour, for a pale ale. Or an IPA. You know I like complexity. This tastes more complex to me than your average IPA.

make it snow says: It’s so interesting to me that you’re perceiving it as sour. Because, you know, it’s not sour mash, it’s not lactic fermentation, it’s not a brett beer. And yet, I’m getting kind of the same impression. I had it as a sort of citrus/chemical combination.

lady snow: I don’t get chemical at all. It reminds me of the brett IPAs we’ve had. It’s got a kind of an indefinable funk to it.

make it snow says: It doesn’t taste like a brett beer to me, especially, but it’s dry like a brett beer is.

lady snow says: It’s really dry.

make it snow says: That makes it kind of more-ish to me.

lady snow says: Yeah, like with a dry champagne. You just want to keep taking sips.

tl;dr: This is as much a review of the idea of canned beer as of Lagunitas 12th of Never Ale. The latter’s very hoppy and may not be for you. The former is good as hell and has something for every palate.

Grade: SHOTGUN

make it snow is an alot of beer and level 70 Fallout 4 player. He drank three and two thirds cans of Lagunitas 12th of Never Ale while writing this review, and lady snow drank the other four ounces. Starting next week, Beer Barrel will run on Wednesdays. Starting this week, there may be some lazy-ass Beer Barrel listicle on Wednesday to hold you over. Stay tuned!