reCaptcha always failing

I ran into an issue implementing reCaptcha on my website, after making several updates and changes to my architecture. The problem was the reCaptcha was always failing, even after every successful submission. In order to figure out the problem, I put the following code in the submit method of the Drupal7Post class.

$response = drupal_http_request(ReCaptcha::SITE_VERIFY_URL, $options);
var_dump($response);
exit();

After submitting another reCaptcha, an error message displayed describing a problem with SSL. I realized that I had just updated PHP and started using php-fpm, and I didn't install the openssl PHP module. Everything worked fine after installing that module, and restarting my php-fpm process.

It is worth noting, I didn't see any informative errors in the watchdog logs, or web server logs.