But I kinda cheated.
The company I work for is getting manic about team building excersizes. So my group went to a relatively local place ( [link|http://www.thebrewkettle.com/|http://www.thebrewkettle.com/] ) to brew beer as a team. Three weeks ago we split into 3 groups and made oatmeal stout, strong ale, and Czech pilsner. Yesterday we went back to bottle it. It came out pretty good.
5 out of 8 of us has some brewing experiance but we agreed that while a little more expensive, this was a lot easier than doing it in the basement or garage.

I made a batch of ginger ale some years ago while in cooking school. Our class was experimenting with fresh ginger and we had large quantities of peels (we peeled the ginger with a spoon and kept the scraps.) The receipe was similar except that we used a large pressure cooker for the brewing vessel. Was a *LOT* more pungent than the stuff you get in the store.