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You can do that with CSS pseudo nth-child classes. Here is an example to make first two strong black.
.beer-description strong:nth-child(1), .beer-description strong:nth-child(2) {
color: #404040;
}
You can modify CSS in this as you wish.

Can't really think of a reason for the behaviour, maybe it is just a bug in the theme, of course I can't say anything specific without knowing the code. But you should be able get around it by making use of the wp_default_editor hook and explicitly set the type of editor you want to show first, which is inside the function with the same name, so ...