Grails Domain Object hasMany irregular behaviour using contains

Grails Domain Object hasMany irregular behaviour using contains

I'm having an issue where calling .contains() on one of my domain classes'
hasMany relationships is not doing the same when running normally, or when
debugging. The situation is as follows:
I have 2 domain objects, A and B. A has a hasMany relationship with B.
class A {
...
static hasMany = [bees: B]
...
}
Now, during the execution of one of my filters, I grab my current user
from the spring security service. This user also contains a single
instance of B. What my filter should do is to check if the instance of B
in the user is contained in some instance of A.
Assume that the instances of B are actually referring to the same object
(since they are).
Now, the issue arises. Calling:
if (instanceOfA.bees.contains(user.instanceOfB)) {
println 'success'
} else {
println 'failure'
}
prints failure during normal (or debugging without stepping through the
code) execution. However, if I put a break-point there, and step through
the code, it correctly executes the contains() and prints success.
I have also implemented equals, hashCode and compareTo in an attempt to
resolve this, but with the same behaviour.