Originally Posted by number_6

A decade ago both Carling and Molson reformulated their excellent beers to appeal to a wider market and ... made them taste more like Bud. Very strange strategy, no idea how well it worked for them (in either gaining market share or reducing their production costs), but I stopped drinking them as they lost a lot of taste. Blandness does seem to be a desired characteristic in mass-market beers (usually called "easy drinking", as in water).