>A gram scale is highly recommended for getting the proportions right; a teaspoon can mean something completely different depending on whether your leaves are rolled into tight balls, loosely packed, etc.

Maybe this is why I find I brew them inconsistently. I take my coffee game very seriously, but I've never bothered to weigh tea. Maybe I should.

I learned another method for oolong tea from some Chinese coworkers called grandpa style. You leave a few oolong leaves in the bottom of your cup and just continuously top it off with hot water.

I second the oolong recommendation. For those not in SF: you can get a remarkably wide variety of fairly priced oolong teas from Upton Tea (http://uptontea.com/) as well as all sorts of strange and exotic teas you probably have never heard of before (tea flower tea; kukicha; genmai-cha; pu'erh), and often they have a sample available for ~$3, so you can easily sample 20 or more teas in a single order of $60. I have used them for a decade now and I love them.

(One aspect their site is weak on is customer reviews. You can't review unless you order more than a sampler and they archive reviews regularly, so I keep mine on my own web page: http://www.gwern.net/Tea )

I don't think a gram scale is all that necessary since you can easily calibrate the amount to your liking, and I've gotten by fine without using one for years. It is helpful for side by side reviews so you can be sure you are comparing different teas favorably.

I just bought their Darjeeling and Assam samplers a few weeks ago! Good stuff. I've also had very good experiences with Mountain Tea[3] and Eco-Cha (specifically their rare tea club[4]).

I could get by without using a gram scale, but mostly I like having it around for peace of mind. I didn't figure out the right tea/water ratio for my oolongs until I started measuring them. It's also nice for when you have a particularly expensive or rare tea and you want to make sure that everything is perfect.

[3]: http://www.mountaintea.com

[4]: http://teaclub.eco-cha.com

In all fairness, you can brew with larger amounts in shorter time and also resteep with black tea too, or I suppose green too.

"Get the leaves wet and drink the water" is really all you have to do for tea. All these other rules are just people saying how they like to have it, but you don't have to.

And yeah, oolong variety is not as well-known as it should be. Blame it on health-hype for green tea.

Sure, but my impression is that the taste does change depending on which way you brew it. Larger/shorter tends to really bring out the more subtle flavors, which oolongs have in abundance; meanwhile, traditional black teas like Darjeeling are so potent that going smaller/longer works best. (I've tried brewing those teas larger/shorter a few times and it was just too much for me!) I also think the # of possible resteeps is directly correlated to your brewing technique: smaller/longer sucks up most of the flavor in the initial brew, while larger/shorter leaves a lot of flavor for later infusions. (But I could be wrong about both of these things.)

Oolongs are great. I'd be interested in knowing which one you have that tastes like coffee.

All three of the roasted Dong Ding oolongs I've tried have had that lingering coffee-like rich roasty bitterness — though I'm not a huge coffee drinker, so maybe somebody with more of a taste for coffee would disagree.

There are also coffees (Ethiopian, Kenyan) that when light roasted are especially tea-like and fruity. Not roasty or bitter at all. Like, you'd wonder if it's even coffee if you're only used to the homogenous dark Starbucks stuff.

Try a pu'er -- incredibly dark, rich fermented teas. If you're in SF, Red Blossom Tea Company has a wonderful selection.