Hepatitis C virus (HCV)-specific T cells are key factors in the outcome of acute HCV infection and in protective immunity. This review recapitulates the steps that immunologists have taken in the past 25 years to dissect the role of T cell responses in HCV infection. It describes technical as well as disease-specific challenges that were caused by the inapparent onset of acute HCV infection, the difficulty to identify subjects who spontaneously clear HCV infection, the low frequency of HCV-specific T cells in the blood of chronically infected patients, and the lack of small animal models with intact immune systems to study virus-host interaction. The review provides a historical perspective on techniques and key findings, and identifies areas for future research.