Advanced Cicerone - Beer Styles Practice Exam

Spontaneous fermentation relies on wild yeasts and bacteria from the brewery environment rather than pitching a specific yeast strain. The classic example is Lambic, which is brewed in Belgium and ferments with these wild microflora to develop a tart, funky character. Geuze is a close relative that comes from blending young lambics with old ones and then allowing additional fermentation to occur, often in the bottle, so carbonation and complexity come from the same spontaneous origins of the base beers. Kriek is essentially a cherry-infused lambic, a fruit variant built on the same spontaneous foundation, while Flanders red is a sour ale produced with deliberate mixed fermentation using cultured microbes rather than relying on the ambient microflora. So the two forms that embody spontaneous fermentation in this pairing are Lambic and Geuze.