Sour

"Sour" in strain culture refers to the Sour Diesel family, which emerged on the U.S. East Coast — New York City and the Northeast — in the early to mid-1990s. The central figure is "AJ" (reportedly Joe Murray), who obtained a Chemdog '91 clone through the Wetlands Music Club scene in Manhattan, a Grateful Dead-adjacent venue. ⚠️ Lineage heavily disputed: two main narratives hold that Sour Diesel is Chemdog '91 × DNL (Northern Lights/Shiva × Hawaiian), resulting from an accidental hermaphrodite pollination, or Chemdog '91 × Massachusetts Super Skunk. Most historians treat Sour Diesel, East Coast Sour Diesel (ECSD), and "AJ's Sour" as the same clone-only cut with minor phenotypic drift. Sour Diesel put NYC on the cannabis map in an era dominated by West Coast indicas, became an East Coast hip-hop status symbol in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and established "sour" and "diesel" as distinct quality descriptors.