Classic Ride CAN SOUR DIESEL KEEP UP WITH COMMERCIALIZATION? BY THOMAS MITCHELL I’ll never forget the fi rst time my parents accused me of smoking weed. I thought I’d done everything right: My teeth were brushed, my eyes were clear and my shirt was fresh. The giveaway wasn’t how I looked, though, my old man later told me. It was the gas fumes coming out of my bedroom. Trying to contain Sour Diesel’s skunky, sour aroma of gas and tennis balls with a few Ziploc bags is like taking on a charging rhino with a slingshot. Every doe-eyed pot smoker discovers this eventually, and it was Sour Diesel that enlightened us. If you compare strains to beer, Sour Diesel is a Pilsner. Smooth, refi ned and consistent, and top of the list for our desert island stash. But Sour Diesel is also fi nicky in the grow, notoriously susceptible to powdery mildew, and it doesn’t yield a lot of weight compared to some of today’s resin-covered heavyweights, which can smell damn good in their own right. Built on a loose, old-school bud struc- ture and lacking the frosty trichomes of its modern counterparts, Sour Diesel has become harder to fi nd in Denver over the years as users trend toward newer, sexier strains. Nearly every dispensary had an in-house cut when recreational stores fi rst opened in 2014, serving as a standard for judging grower against grower. Since then, though, the go-to defi ning strain has gone from Sour Diesel to Blue Dream to Gorilla Glue to Girl Scout Cookies to GMO to who gives a hoot, because none of the new kids will bring a smile to a longtime grower’s face like Sour D. “I still think it’s one of the best strains we have,” says Veritas Fine Cannabis co- founder and longtime cannabis grower Mike Leibowitz. A New England native, Leibowitz remembers his reaction to Sour Diesel’s energetic, clear-minded high in the ’90s. “We were smoking a lot of Skunks at that point, and I was getting tired of them. But then Sour Diesel comes along,” he recalls. “It was so potent, but in a different 8 Sour Diesel’s open bud structure and vibrant colors are easy to recognize. kind of way — more uplifting. It wasn’t making you go straight to bed, and that was new back then.” Sour Diesel’s backstory and genetics are a little hazy, but it’s generally accepted as having a Chemdog infl uence, and rose to fame on the East Coast over two de- cades ago before eventually ending up in the hands of California growers. The strain has trademark fl uffy lime-green buds and fan leaves that look like bits of dark-green paper, and an even more recognizable smell and taste. The effects, right out of a euphoric cup of coffee, make for a quintessential daytime high. When medical marijuana dispensaries began opening in Colorado in 2008, Sour Diesel was one of the fi rst plants that a grower would choose. Although he says he’s been able to garner a good yield from the strain, Lei- bowitz says that Sour Diesel takes longer to bloom than most strains and “has a lot of challenges” compared to other cannabis varieties. Despite being one of his favorites at the company, Sour Diesel doesn’t gain as many new fans as it used to, either, he notes. And for all the passion and love they put into the plants, growers still have to T HE C HRONICLE F ALL 2021 WESTWORD.COM run a business. “There are so many fl avors of the week and month that are legitimately awesome. I’ve grown Sour Diesel for a long time, so I get why people would look at Orange Zkit- tlez or some form of Cookies, but for me it’s one of the top strains in the world,” he says. “No one is bragging about breeding with Sour Diesel, though, because that’s what they did eight years ago. If you’re coming out of the gate as your own fl ower company right now, you’re probably not leading the news with Sour Diesel at this point.” New growers trying to make a reputa- tion for themselves have to weigh more than popularity when picking out strains or breeding lines, too. Malek Noueiry, founder of wholesale cultivation Malek’s Premium Cannabis, says he works to bal- ance commercial factors such as yield, po- tency, pathogen resistance and fl owering time when picking out strains to grow, and cannabis breeders have been matching strains to maximize those characteris- tics. Taking Sour Diesel’s gassy qualities into consideration and matching it with a sturdier strain has been done before and will be done again, continued on page 12 THOMAS MITCHELL
