This was absolutely not a failure of ‘middle management’ - this was a top-down strategy to increase profits and the efficiency of their breweries. The Uihlein family owned the brewery and made the calls to gradually change the brewing methods and ingredients hoping people wouldn’t notice the incremental changes.

The owners of a company are generally not referred to as ‘middle management’.

It's interesting to me consider why it is that middle management is considered so reviled in our culture. It's kind of like, people want to punch up, but not so far upward to put themselves at risk of angering ownership. I also suppose that in a culture that idolizes both ownership and manual labor, people leadership at the scale of middle management is poorly understood and undervalued.

Historically, middle management was the dumping ground for people who had enough tenure that you had to promote them somewhere, but weren’t trusted to actually run the company. They also serve a strategic “bad cop” function at times, letting upper management remain likable and respected.

> Middle managers kept cutting costs at the expense of quality

The article describes that cost-cutting as mandated by the company's president, Robert Uihlein.

Middle managers don't usually make those decisions, not product wide as far as I know.