I partially agree because a lot of people will not buy slopes as they'll see them as lab geek paraphernalia.
Well quite - that and just the fear of the unknown. I want to reduce the numbers of that "lot of people", which means reducing the barriers to them giving Brewlab yeast a go. Some of that can be done with education (demos of a home microbiology setup at shows?) but the big one would be giving them the yeast in a format they are used to.
I disagree because liquid yeast often arrives in less than great condition and needs a starter. The Brewlab slopes provide yeast in very good condition. And there is nobody less microbiologically competent than me, and I can assure you it is a doddle to make a starter from a slope. Even for me.
I don't need persuading, I worked in labs with all the kit - laminar flowhoods etc - for several years. Sometimes I innoculated hundreds of yeast cultures in a day. It doesn't faze me at all - but that doesn't stop me from having empathy for people who are nervous about the whole thing.
It doesn't help that yeast is a bit of a forgotten ingredient, and it has a bit of mystique about it. So you get a lot people, particularly those into US styles, who might obsess over their hop selection and the exact timing and temperature of dryhops, but whose approach to yeast is "well just bung some US-05 in it". Or maybe if they're fancy - "smack a pack of 1318 and bung that in it".
Yes, I usually do a starter with liquid yeast, even if it's just a vitality starter on brewday - but how many people do that, versus "Oh well the manufacturer says it's ready to pitch, so I'll just bung it in"?
I suspect maybe 80+% of people?
If you can make beer you can make a Brewlab starter. It's barely different from any other starter. The issue is marketing. Brewlab isn't run as a homebrew yeast selling operation like the American operations.
The "American operations" are companies that sell to commercial breweries with a sideline in selling to homebrewers. The likes of Lallemand sell to bakeries with a sideline in brewing. Brewlab are selling to commercial breweries and are trying to figure out how to sell to homebrewers.
That's not the issue. With a slope you're just starting with a much smaller volume of yeast, which means that a) ideally you need stepped starters so an extra step to introduce contamination and b) any contamination at the "toothpick" stage is far more material than if you're eg making a starter with 200 billion cells from Omega as it's "diluted" in ?1000x less yeast.
And it's not always easy doing microbiology at home. To cut a long story short, I'm OK pouring plates at my place - you get the odd one contaminated but not enough to be a problem - and at a friend's place in winter it was worse but not too much of a problem. But in summer it was just impossible. It's an old house in the country with no extractor fan or anything, the only ventilation (in summer but not winter) is opening the back door and obviously it stirs up a whole swarm of mould spores that are lying around the place and/or coming in from the garden.
Obviously pouring plates is more vulnerable to contamination than innoculating a starter, but it taught me a bit of a lesson that you can't take it for granted that microbiology at home will be as easy as it is in a flowhood in a lab. But if it was someone without lab experience who tried to use their first slope in that house in the summer, they would assume that any contamination was their fault, so slopes are Too Difficult and just go back to smack packs.