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One of the guys that worked for me this summer told us how to make mesquite syrup. My husband got all motivated this week and made a couple batches. Wow, I love it!! It's easy to make and tastes amazing. It's more of a dark caramel flavor than regular maple syrup. To make some, collect a bunch of ripe mesquite beans. Mesquite trees vary in their sweetness, so taste some of the beans to see if they taste good. If they do, use them. If not, find a better tree. This year our tree in the backyard made a large amount of beans and we didn't collect them until this past week. So they have been sitting on the ground since summer, which isn't a problem if you pick through them and get the best ones. If you see tiny holes in the beans, that's usually good because that means that the insect that can live in the beans has vacated the bean. So anyway, you can collect them ripe off the tree or off the ground a long time later. They will be good either way. However, don't collect wet beans and don't collect them during monsoon season (apparently there is a mold that can grow on wet beans and it has a toxin associated with it). Anyway, collect a bunch of very dry beans and put them in a pot and cover with water. You can break up the beans to expose more surface area, which should help get more sugars out, but you don't have to break them up. Boil for 15 minutes and then let them steep in the water for a couple hours. Some recipes online call for simmering them for 12 hours, but we haven't found this to be necessary. But do it whatever way you like best. After steeping, we remove the beans and then boil the water to reduce it down a lot. A full pot might reduce down in a couple hours of boiling to be a density that is very sweet. To know when it's done, just keep tasting it and when it gets to your liking, it's done! It has a complex flavor with an interesting and distinctive aftertaste. I have yet to figure out what to put in to thicken it up, but we don't really need it thick anyway. The kitchen smells great while it's boiling down! here is a pic of the syrup boiling down.