The Conference is Death & Co's four-spirit answer to the Old Fashioned, built in New York City in August 2007 by bartender Brian Miller. Miller split the base four ways — equal parts bourbon, rye, Calvados, and Cognac — after a server asked him for something stirred and strong at the end of a shift, and Bittermens co-founder Avery Glasser, a regular at the bar that night, suggested finishing it with the company's then-new Xocolatl mole bitters. The recipe stuck and has stayed on Death & Co's menu at every location since. Difford's Guide files it under tiki/tropical cocktails for the way it layers multiple spirits into one glass rather than for any rum or fruit content — this is a dry, boozy whiskey-and-brandy sipper, not a tropical drink in the usual sense, and we're presenting it here with that distinction made plain.
It tied that drink together like a shoelace.
Brian Miller, Death & CoA Bar-Napkin Old Fashioned
One night in August 2007, a server at Death & Co asked Brian Miller for something stirred and boozy as his shift wound down. Miller was deep into rye and bourbon at the time and had a long-standing soft spot for Cognac and Calvados, so instead of picking one brown spirit for an Old Fashioned, he split the base four ways.
Avery Glasser, co-founder of Bittermens and a regular at the bar that night, suggested a dash of the company's Xocolatl mole bitters. Miller has said the mole bitters "tied that drink together like a shoelace," and the build never changed after that. The name comes from M*A*S*H — a nod to a Season 2 episode where a character calls a "conference" while pouring several spirits into one glass.
The Spec
This build follows Death & Co's published recipe closely: equal parts of four brown spirits, a short pour of demerara syrup, and two bitters — one classic, one spiced — stirred over a single large cube.
Two bitters, two different jobs
Angostura keeps the drink reading like a familiar Old Fashioned; the single dash of Xocolatl mole bitters, with its cacao and chile notes, is what makes four separate brown spirits taste like they were always meant to share a glass.
Four spirits instead of one
Bourbon brings sweetness and corn, rye brings spice, Calvados brings orchard-fruit depth, and Cognac brings grape-driven richness — each at a quarter of the base, none of them loud enough to take over.
Bottom Line
The Conference is proof that "tiki" can mean built from a lot of spirits just as easily as built from rum and juice — a bone-dry, four-way whiskey-and-brandy Old Fashioned that earns its seat on the list by complexity, not climate.