Highlights for me are the ability to set boil volume in absolute amounts instead of percent and the ability to adjust the grain absorbtion for your system.
Also great is the idea of estimated vs measured values. BeerSmith 1 had this for OG and FG, but BeerSmith 2 lets you have measured mash efficiency vs expected, measured brewhouse efficiency vs expected, measured boil volume vs expected, measured batch volume vs expected and measured bottling volume vs expected. There's probably more, but what this means is you can use one recipe entry to hold the recipe you tried to follow as well as what actually happened. Before, I started with the recipe I had in mind and had to modify it to match what actually happened (for example, if my evaporation rate was off and I had to change the final batch volume to match). By doing so, I lost the original recipe. I like it, though it still needs to be extended to priming sugar calculations for the expected volume vs the actual volume after trub loss.
There's also a lot more data in general, with each recipe being divided into multiple tabs. While the organization within the tabs could be better and more intuitive, it's an excellent first step. The sheer amount of data that BeerSmith 2 records and calculates is mind boggling and will let OCD brewers like me really get into the guts of their recipes.
Another small but nice improvement I noticed is the ability to adjust the level of precision for your units. I was always annoyed that BeerSmith let you input values for several decimal places, but only displayed two units if you tabbed out of the field. If you wanted to input 6 ounces exactly, you had to type 0.375 into the field and immediately hit enter. If you tabbed out of the field, or if you opened the ingredient again and hit okay, it would round off to .38, which is 6.08 ounces, and then round AGAIN to 6.1 ounces. Now you can type in whatever precision you'd like, as long as you set the precision level in the units options.
The most obvious changes are the massive interface improvements, with the most notable being tabbed browsing. You can now have as many recipes, tools and other doodads open as you want. Welcome to 2011, BeerSmith.
There are tons of new features that I can't get into, but I highly recommend you upgrade to BeerSmith 2 immediately. It is more than worth the cost, and it will only get better as the developer continues to fix bugs and add features. BeerSmith 2 is by far the best brewing software there is, marred only by a few minor issues that I'd never have noticed if it wasn't so damn good otherwise.
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