June in Denmark is elderflower. You smell it before you see it, that honeyed sweetness drifting from every hedge and garden wall, the cream-white umbels turning their faces toward the longest days of the year. This is the moment. The season decides, and it gives you about two weeks.

Hyldeblomstsnaps is one of the simplest things you can make and one of the most rewarding. You pick elderflower heads on a dry morning, lower them into a bottle of aquavit, and wait. A week later you strain it, and what comes out is something transformed: pale gold, fragrant, tasting of summer concentrated into a glass. It's the snaps you pour ice-cold at midsummer, at a long lunch table, with the toast that means the light has reached its peak.

There is almost nothing to get wrong here, but I'll tell you the two things that matter. Pick the flowers on a dry day, after the morning dew has burned off but before the afternoon heat. Wet flowers dilute the spirit and can turn it cloudy. And don't shake the pollen from the heads. That golden dust is where the deepest flavor lives. Hold a flower to your nose: if it smells of honey and muscat, it's ready. If it smells green and faint, wait another day. The joy of waiting is real, and the elderflower will tell you when it's time.