Actually, it was the Market Research industry (which sprang into power after the war) that was responsible for bland beer, and bland comestibles in general. Read Vance Packard's "Hidden Persuaders" (itself writtein in 1957, so this is not exactly news).
The MR wonks determined (whether true or not) that the post-war American palate preferred "light" beer, and "light" food (i.e., whitebread), over products with
flavor. The less you could actually taste a product, the better it would sell, according to the MR boys. So, "light beer" (and I believe Packard used the term, back in '57!), and the proliferation of bland, tasteless foodstuffs foisted on an entire culture.
I must say that whether their initial observation was correct, it has certainly
become correct. (I would not be surprised if their "observation" was more of a self-fulfilling prophecy.) People don't like food that they can taste!
You can wrap all sorts of words around it, nuance it to hell and back, but in the final analysis, people in this country, by and large, do NOT like food that they can taste. Given a choice between bland, flavorless food, and something with
flavor, they will, based on my own observations, opt for the no-flavor stuff, declare the "with-flavor" stuff to be "too strong", "too hot", or "something wrong with it", as if
flavor was an indicator of food being "off".
For variety, they will doctor their bland, tasteless food with salt. Lots of salt.
Personally, I pin the blame on the MR industry. I think that more than
observe "national tastes", they
shaped them. It was B.F. Skinner, I believe, who declared that companies (and governments too, if memory serves) should, rather than attempt to "give the people what they want", instead, make the people want what they've got to give them.
Much better for the bottom line. (Why bother going to the trouble -- and
expense -- of making your food
flavorful, when you could, at a far lower cost, make the customers
want food that they couldn't taste? (And for those adventerous souls who demanded a bit more, there's always the salt-shaker to liven things up!)
Beer was a natural for this kind of process. I'm not a brewer, but it seems to me that it's
got to be easier (and cheaper) to produce a mild variety of horse-piss, than to create something with
flavor. Think about it -- when you start giving your foods
flavor, there's always the possibility that you'll end up with a
bad flavor! But when the benchmark is the
absence of flavor, how can you go wrong?
So, convince the teeming masses that they
want stuff they can't taste -- form mass opinion by convincing the individual that "everyone
else thinks this way" -- and the battle is over before it began!
The same process works in politics. Look at "push-polling" -- convince the "average voter" that "everyone
else" supports the candidate/position/policy/law in question, and lo and behold
he will support it
too!
But getting back to beer -- I can't drink it anymore.
Seems to be something wrong with a vein in the back of my skull. I get an awful migraine when I drink, so, I don't drink. But, before this happened, I used to enjoy a nice Guinness (warm), or, a decent home-made brew a friend made (a rather stout brew the name of which I have forgotten).
Imagine that, I had to get back on OFF topic!