SharePoint site page title dissapears on page load

The page title on our SharePoint site disappeared after some code changes on the master page. Initially we thought SharePoint was doing something strange and found a work around that tried to resolve the problem by storing the site title in a global variable on page init and setting the document title once the page had fully loaded.

The title section in the header looked as follows:

Changing the title to the following format resolved the problem:

Strange but true.