I hate this concept, even as late as the mid-1970s the US was close to a Cluster monoculture and breeding was all for alpha. That started to change with Cascade - launched in 1971 but first made into a commercial beer in 1976, otherwise you're just looking at Nugget, Galena, Willamette and a few minor ones like Eroica and Horizon - even then I'd have to double-check the dates.
That's not to say you couldn't do something using these hops with NEIPA-type techniques, but the result won't be a NEIPA. The trouble is that the old-school hops tend to be one-dimensional, so you need to blend hops and take advantage of biotransformation in order to get an interesting flavour. So Nugget has lots of linalool, more usefully Bravo has lots of geraniol, but neither makes a particularly interesting beer on its own. Chinook seems a good target for biotransformation but you need all the thiols you can get, so blackcurranty hops like Bramling Cross, Bullion etc will help. Have a good rummage among the less fashionable hop varieties, there's plenty of good biochemistry there even if you won't find all that you want in a single variety. You're looking at a blend of certainly 3-4 hops, possibly 5-6 or more, to get an acceptable level of complexity.
Since the big 3 (Citra/Mosaic/Galaxy) all cost about the same here, rather than limit by date, one of my todo list is a "threequarters" NEIPA - 3/4 of the usual ABV (so 4-4.5%ish) and using hops that are no more than 75% of the price of CMG. Which pretty much knocks out all the fancy US proprietary hops, you're looking at nothing that costs much more than eg Chinook. I've a few ideas to test first, but I invite others here to see what they can do under that constraint - I'm not sure how it translates to the US, but see how "no more expensive than Chinook" works.
Yeast are a big part of making this work - they have to contribute in the form of esters and hop biotransformation. In the same way that only some yeast can convert chemicals in the grist to produce the 4-VG ("clove") typical of a hefe, only some yeast can convert chemicals in the hops into more interesting flavours. So forget Chico, Conan doesn't seem very good at biotransformation (although the peach thing is helpful), whereas the likes of 1318 and T-58 seem more useful here. There's some logic behind these new three-way NEIPA blends which have Sacc Trois and Conan for yeast flavours and 1318 for biotransformation and flavour, I'd probably roll my own blend based around 1318, which might feature eg a pinch of T-58 and possibly a late addition of Hornindal among other things.
PS Simcoe and Amarillo old-school? They're still under (20-year) patent! I'd certainly regard those post-2000 releases as a different generation to the likes of even Centennial (released in 1990).
