SweeTango had a great 2011 — and apple lovers are eagerly awaiting the arrival of this year’s SweeTango season.

The anticipation has been growing ever since last year’s crop disappeared into the shopping baskets of apple lovers who know a superior apple when they see and taste one.

Fueling the growing desire was a great article about SweeTango in The New Yorker. The story, part of the magazine’s annual food issue, came out in November, after most SweeTango apples had disappeared from the produce aisle.

So we’re excited that a legion of New Yorker readers eager to try SweeTango for the first time will be able to get their hands on this seasonal treat in a few weeks.

John Seabrook’s New Yorker article told the story of how SweeTango came to be — how expert breeding and controlled growing practices led to a superior apple. Seabrook traced the history of the University of Minnesota’s apple breeding program, and its success with Honeycrisp and other varieties. He spoke to David Bedford, the university horticulturalist whose quest for a better apple led him to cross Honeycrisp and Zestar!, a match that resulted in the variety that became SweeTango.

Here’s how Seabrook describes biting into a SweeTango:

SweeTango has much larger cells than other apples, and when you bite into it the cells shatter, rather than cleaving along the cell walls, as is the case with most popular apples. The bursting of the cells fills your mouth with juice. Chunks of SweeTango snap off in your mouth with a loud cracking sound. Although a crisp texture is the single most than taste, according to one study—crispness is more a matter of acoustics than of mouthfeel. Vibrations pass along the lower jaw and set the cochlea trembling. Biting into a really crisp apple, one feels, in the words of Edward Bunyard, the author of “The Anatomy of Dessert,” “a certain joy in crashing through living tissue, a memory of Neanderthal days.”

A summary of The New Yorker story is here. Seabrook also made a short video in which he describes the experience of biting into a SweeTango as “tasting music.”

We’re excited to build on our success this year and can’t wait to be at a local grocery store near you soon. We’ll be hitting stores in early September, so be sure to check back with us regularly at our Finding SweeTango page, as well as at our Facebook and Twitter pages.

And in case you missed the news about our First Bite Giveaway, you can still enter for a chance to win one of the first boxes of SweeTango apples from the 2012 harvest. Enter before 11:59 p.m. CST on Sunday, Aug. 19.

While you’re waiting, check out a new video highlighting the SweeTango story.