In this study, a vacuum swing adsorption (VSA) process was designed to recover ethanol from a binary gas mixture of ethanol and CO2. The VSA feed gas originates from the process of alcoholic beverage dealcoholization where ethanol is stripped off the standard beer by CO2 flowing upward in the exchange column. The CO2 recovery of the ethanol removal VSA has to be maintained as high as possible in order to improve the ethanol removal efficiency and reduce the energy consumption for both the vacuum pump and ethanol trap. To this end, an ethanol recovery four-step VSA unit using MFI zeolites was analyzed by equilibrium theory in which both non-linearity of ethanol isotherms and incomplete purging were taken into account. The theoretical study revealed that the extent of purging had to be slightly greater than its minimum usage to achieve maximum CO2 recovery. In addition, the power consumption for evacuation and the process productivity per cycle were estimated. It turned out that, to minimize the specific power consumption, high desorption pressure and a low extent of purging would be favored. With a view of maximizing the process productivity per cycle, the extent of purging has to be large. At a high extent of purging, the specific energy consumption can be saved by having the VSA run at low desorption pressure.