les24preludes Don’t worry about ‘bypass’ (it affects all brewers to some degree), to date it has no significant evidence with respect to normal brews/specific brewers. Only worry if you get extremely drying, weak brews, which are a sign of too fine a grind/too fast a pour causing catastrophic channelling (where some parts of the bed are not well extracted, causing weakness, other parts are over-exposed to the rinsing of brew water causing the smoky drying bitterness). This failure mode is rare & easy to avoid by grinding coarser.
The most important thing you can do is tie up grind size setting & pour speed, for a specific brewer.
By all means tweak to your heart’s content, but be sure to get the basics sorted first. Keep grind setting & brew size the same, tweak pour speed.
I have over 2,000 logged, dialled-in, scored & measured brews and good results achieved with V60, Melitta, Bartleet (3 hole Melitta style), Steel Kalita 185, Fellow Stagg X & more (most with gooseneck, some with regular kettle, some with Melitta Aromaboy).
